


The Voice of Your Eyes

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Drug Abuse, Friends to Lovers, Frottage, M/M, Minor Character Death, Time Skips, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Wordcount: 30.000-50.000, non-canon ages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-06-07
Packaged: 2018-01-09 06:51:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 29
Words: 30,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes and John Watson don't meet at Barts. They meet twenty six years earlier amidst fields of slaughtered cherry blossom and the sound of a dying violin.</p><p>  <i>(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_"We found that spot when you were eleven._

_Do you remember?_

_It wasn’t even a particularly groundbreaking moment. We just- did. It was as good a place as any could have been, really. Cold, quite miserable, private._

_Ours._

_The rain was the worst part._

_It was a few months after I had led you away from those boys. I had said, “Why didn’t you just walk away?” Because you could have. They wouldn’t have dared to follow you further. And you had looked me in the eye and said, “Because they’ll still be there tomorrow,” and, “there’s no where really for me to go.”_

_I think that’s when I realised that I. Well. I’m not entirely sure what I realised, but it was definitely something. Perhaps that if I didn’t break eye contact then, if I didn’t glance away to never look back there was potential for something revolutionary. That I would lose something irretrievable, but I didn’t quite know what._

_I was glad to see it go._

_It’s funny really: We thought it would last forever, our own private haven of fantastical separation and escapism. Because that’s what we were to each other, at first. A voice who listened. Nothing more._

_We grew, though._

_The top floor of an unused multi-storey carpark. A stupid idea, in retrospect, but without it - without you - I’m not sure I’d still be here. So thanks, I suppose._

_I can still imagine the taste of the air, up there. The sound of the pigeons nesting in the heart of such an ugly, concrete structure. The sound of home._

_All of my greatest memories are from up there._

_I miss you."_


	2. 1987, August

As John walks he imagines the cherry blossom living, breathing, singing under his feet.

He imagines it dying as it falls from the branches.

The earth is never as still as it is now, exactly at this moment when everything has stopped save for his gait.

Everything has never felt as loud.

The wind is gentle in his hair, the bag weighty on his back and he wishes nothing more than for his feet to continue into the everness, over aeons of fallen flowers and into the seas of the rotting wasteland beyond.

A noise like doused fire - pathetic as it clings to forgotten flame - permeates the air and he stops. His feet are gently crushing the flowers; the dying, the dead.

He pauses and his heartbeat waits eagerly in his ears.

The sound is reinstituted and it is less like fire now, more like the sad cries of a little boy, fallen, with grazed knees perhaps.

His steps continue, unaffected.

Again, the litany of distress and never before has he felt more compelled to protect, soothe. He is twelve years old and the cherry blossom will fall for years to come, years in which he might forget the feel of it beneath his shoe, but now, in this precise instant when all the planet has stopped, one child is yelling out, crying.

Though he is not crying for himself.

John finds his feet turning the corner onto a different street, such a separate plane of existence and yet exactly the same, and he sees.

The moment, this moment cannot be reversed and for all of his life, he is thankful for this. For surely if he were able, right now, when he _sees_ , he would rewind his footsteps. And what a travesty that would be.

The cherry blossom doesn’t fall on this street.

Although it did, once.

The boy, the source of all of the cries that the universe has surely ever created, lies on his side and even from such a great distance, it is evident he is bruised. Beaten. Defenceless.

His arms stretch as if in yearning towards a shape that seems as equally damaged to his left. A box of some description. A violin case.

He is in yearning, reaching and scrabbling at the harsh tarmac beneath his form as if to soothe the shape, to comfort it. He never arrives.

The cherry blossom doesn’t fall on this street, although a few stray flowers batter the sides of John’s shoes in their bid to escape the scene. A reminder; they remind him; they will always remind him.

Other figures surround the child, kicking and spitting but with all of their inflictions, he hardly reacts. He only reaches. Focused yet resigned.

John looks to the sky and he wishes- oh, how he wishes he could see the stars to allow him to breathe in a crystalline night, but the sun shines on.

He walks towards the boy, takes his hand and leads him away. Towards the cherry blossom, the carpeted road, the daylight, his starlight. The other children, hateful, hateful, hateful, look on and the small, fragile child does not react. He only walks.

“Why didn’t you just walk away?” His voice sounds heavy with distaste as he asks.

The boy kicks at the petals beneath both their feet and they should scream, resist, defend themselves against the onslaught. But- but of course, they are already the dead. The dying. Beached on shores of endless pavements. Unsalvageable in all of their beauty.

“They broke it,” he says in answer, motionless and yet bleeding from his every pore; John can taste it in the air that is between them. “They’ll still be there tomorrow, but tomorrow I’ll have nothing they can hurt.”

His gaze flickers up to John’s and the language written there, the sheer volume of words and letters and secrets burdened on a single look--

Everything is alive within this very heartbeat of time. Even the corpses of flowers that die and crumble and turn into infinite dust inhale one, shuddering breath. The life, strangely, suffocates in its wholeness.

“I didn’t walk away because there’s no where really for me to walk to.” John could look past the harsh gaze, sever it, sever everything he thinks he could possibly ever have and the blossom could return to a state of postmortem and everything could right itself perfectly in the exact way it has always done, continuing, surviving, and this will surely destroy his every atom but he maintains the eye contact just the same.

“John,” he says instead, extending his hand.

“Sherlock,” the child replies. He does not take it.

Two names to be always heard in tandem.

The cherry blossom of his heart is flourishing and expiring all in one swift breath and the earth is no longer immobile. It is John that has become still.


	3. 1987, November

Three months later and the sunlight has grown less forgiving.

All that’s left are empty branches, but John doesn’t walk that way anymore.

It’s a different place now that he chooses to haunt; more burning industrialisation, less life left to be crushed. It’s more refreshing. More punishing.

He looks up to the sky and sees no starlight - only the angels are allowed to see that now - nor any sunlight so searing in it’s bland fatuousness. Only grey. The monotony, the constant in a world where nothing remains so; it calms him somewhat.

He looks up and beyond and imagines the clouds parting to reveal the solar system far out of reach. Only the angels can touch.

But there - a flash of dark against a skyline of paleness.

A man- no. A boy. Silhouetted against a rolling wall of discreet colour with no promise of rain.

John knows exactly who it is.

He imagines smashed violins and broken bodies, side by side.

John thinks he’s going to jump.

The earth gives way and his heart is everywhere all at once as his shoes pound on cold metal, up and up. The air is somehow even colder.

He can hear pigeons, somewhere.

Sherlock is motionless on the edge, his hair whipping around his forehead and the steady rise and fall of his shoulders giving the only indication that he is even alive.

“Sherlock,” the word seems right. He turns slowly to face John, his face unsurprised and controlled. Unmoved.

“John,” he hasn’t blinked yet, afraid of the milliseconds of darkness in which he could miss something monumental. Or perhaps merely another slow breath. Easing in. Out. The wind is vicious.

“I’m not going to jump, you must realise.” A smile licks the corners of his mouth. It looks unnatural on such a stoic face.

Something unlocks itself within John’s chest, but the fear remains. Nothing untoward spills out between his lips. Not quite yet. “Then-”

“Why am I on the roof of an abandoned multi-storey car park?” His feet skitter in a sort of dance against the ledge and John thinks absently that he is going to lose his balance, to topple, to fall into the expanse of nothingness and an engage in an inevitable meeting with the pavement on the far side. The universe would surely consume itself. “I like it up here. It’s alive, don’t you think? The whole skyline is alive with hidden promises and mysteries that not even the brickwork, the cement knows. It allows me to remind myself that I can’t know all. Everything. The fullness and entirety to the extent of every cell ever formed, created in all the dark and forgotten spaces where not even I would think to look. And no one can find me here. Well. Except you, evidently.”

His face draws into a grimace and John can see no birds. No evidence of life.

He steps down from the side and John can blink again.

\----

The sleeping bag was cold beneath him, at first. It warmed, like everything does.

“You come up here a lot.” He gestures to the bag, the blankets, the notebook strewn so carelessly and probably containing all of the answers to the understanding of everything John would ever need.

“Yes.”

“I think it must be fate.” John huddles in closer, the bite of the wind now diminished but still present.

“Hm?”

“Me, rescuing you from all sorts of stupid situations.”

“I didn’t need rescuing, John,” he scoffs. His name rolls off the tongue with alarming familiarity. “I was- I was merely existing.”

He ignores him. “I’m like your guardian angel.”

They both like the sound of that, but neither admits it.

It’s silent and it consumes them, but comfortably so. The sky remains grey and they both look towards it, as if waiting for the crack in that impossible facade. It doesn’t come.

“It’s my constant, here.” Sherlock says after a beat. “My regularity.”

“Bit lonely though.”

“Yes. Perhaps.”

“Do you think maybe I could-”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“You didn’t even know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to ask if this could be your constant, too. With me.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

"Good."


	4. 1989, April

It’s familiar. The steps leading to the roof creak in all the right places under his feet. The air tastes right.

Tonight they sit on the ledge, looking out across the spring sunset. The silence is permeating yet expected.

John allows the last bursts of sunlight to tickle his face, to cool his nose. He breathes.

“Why?” Sherlock asks. John glances at his face and it remains unchanged, stern, staring down the dying light with an intensity that he cannot comprehend.

“What?”

“Why do we come here? Both of us. Together.” Sherlock blinks. “Sometimes I feel like a vulture and perhaps simultaneously a mourner, waiting for our own deaths and for some relief of a burden, waiting to move on without these- these terminally ill people in our way so we can get out there and live. Reap the benefits.”

John’s tongue hangs heavy in his mouth. Coated in sand.

“I’m not entirely sure what you mean.”

“We come up here on a regular basis, meet and discuss- well, nothing at all. And yet also everything. Why do we do this; why do we need this? I can’t quite understand it, but we do. It’s essential, somehow. A key that must, must be fit into place for every other component to turn smoothly, but we do not affect our immediate selves. In the future, perhaps, but not at this exact moment. We’re dragging ourselves down, holding on and preventing the change that we long for so desperately. We’re waiting, just like everyone else, we’re waiting for something but we do it together. I’m not just quite sure what for, yet.”

Everything is too dry.

“So. You’re saying you don’t want to do this anymore?”

Sherlock turns to look at him for the first time in what seems to be decades. His eyebrows are furrowed neatly and John can see the entire universe resting quite calmly behind the sheen of his eyes. Only angels, only angels.

“Don’t be dense, John. I want to do this for-” He swallows visibly. “Assuming that ‘this’ is you. Me. Talking about nothing and everything all at once and being a complete entity only on these evenings. I want to do this for. That is, presuming that maybe. Well, until logic prevails and we don’t.”

The pigeons have fallen silent, and so has the rest of the world.

The sunset is paused, forever to be in limbo in this moment, neither bursting with daylight nor engulfed in the darkness and the stars that are so close yet too far to touch.

John exhales through his nose. It does not sound like the intended laugh.

“You know, sometimes I forget that you’re not far less clever than you really are.”

Sherlock’s eyebrows draw impossibly closer together.

“This, here,” His finger swoops in a low arch and touches Sherlock lightly on the temple. He doesn’t flinch. “Is deceptive. Sometimes I manage to convince myself that you’re a fairly ordinary, run-of-the-mill thirteen year old boy with far too many ridiculous and over-inflated ideas in his head. But now- now isn’t one of those times.”

The sun has started to droop again, somewhere in the spaces that got lost between their sentences and their inhalations, and the light fades still.

“And as to why, well. I’ve got to say, that is a bit obvious, isn’t it? For you? We keep returning here, to each other because you keep me sane and I like to think I keep you somewhere around that region, too. Of sanity, that is.”

The silence and darkness builds and swamps around them and gathers in all the places they neglected to see.

The time drags on and words have been uttered in minds alone while fingers have gone stiff and dry with the declining temperature. They don’t need to look at each other. 

They’re facing in the wrong direction for the moon, anyway.

“You do.” Sherlock says and it shatters all of the nothingness that creeps inside mouths and ears.

“Sorry?”

“You do keep me sane.”


	5. 1990, August

The wind is almost nonexistent. 

Sherlock can taste vomit underneath his tongue.

There’s a blossom of purples and blues flowering around his left eye, blood forcing its way out of his bottom lip. His knuckles are unscathed.

He waits.

John arrives and he sees the hurt, the anger, the possessiveness flirt with his features before relaxing into faux blankless, his jaw tense. Sherlock’s afraid it might break.

“You’ve got a new coat.”

It wasn’t a question. He doesn’t answer.

“I like it, it’s good. Suits you.”

A grunt of assent.

“Thank you, John.” The meaning burrows deeper, satisfied and thankful for the lack of pity.

The earth turns still and all of the birds are alive. 

John joins him on the sleeping bag, pushed up against the infrastructure but they don’t need it tonight. The august air is warm and yet Sherlock can’t prevent himself from shaking. His whole skin betrays him.

For a while, words aren’t necessary.

“I’ve got two essays to do tonight.”

Sherlock looks towards the dappled sky, the birds circling slowly upwards to a stretch of openness where no man will ever trespass. He doesn’t look at john.

“You should probably leave, then.” He marvels at how the sounds escaped, perfectly formed to shape words, a sentence. It’s startling in its clarity.

He shifts, returns his legs and arms to himself. Small, smaller. He becomes a nonentity.

“I don’t think so.”

Sherlock raises a solitary eyebrow. He says nothing. His eye throbs dully.

The peace between them is their own source of constant. It’s hollowing, liberating, merely quiet.

John bites at his lip. “Do you think that if - perhaps, and only if - if we were older. Different. If we were- if we were like starlight. Do you think we’d still be here?”

“Side by side, do you mean? Is our meeting inevitable in every possible situational fantasy, down to atomic levels, that we would still _be_? That nothing could alter our happening, because it seems too dangerous for this- this necessity to be left to chance?”

“Yes. Do you think that somewhere, in a universe that doesn’t cater to the strays, the outcasts, the drag-alongs, we would still be drifting? Seperate? Do you think that such a place exists?”

“No.” He worries at his split lip. He doesn’t taste the blood anymore, although he knows it lingers. “And even if a universe like that were possible, we would be _im_ possible. We wouldn’t exist there, because I can’t imagine a scenario in which we would never meet. The very air particles between us seem bonded in a way that I can’t begin to voice the explanation of.”

John huffs. There doesn’t appear to be any air particles between them; just empty space, waiting to be filled.

“I didn’t think you did small talk. Meaningless conversation.”

“I don’t.”

The absence of sound stretches and fluctuates in all of the miniscule gaps and air pockets littered throughout the concrete. It’s pleasant. 

He rolls towards Sherlock and his fingers hover over the blossom of ripeness and swelling on his cheek, although they don’t touch. His eyes flick over the pristine knuckles on both of his hands. Untouched.

“You okay?”

All the traffic has stopped below them, the noise sifted away until everything that remains is vast and open nothingness. Space, perhaps, waiting to be filled.

“Now, yes.”


	6. 1990, December

It’s cold. Desolate. Only the wind can cry now, and her tears are frozen. 

Somehow, in this, it’s easier to find warmth.

The air is so thick at first that they dare not breathe, in fear of inhaling a thousand knives into each lung and simply being consumed by the temperature.

So they descend, one layer, two. 

Absorbed by forgotten concrete.

Deeper into the heart of the beast that they hasten to label as home. 

They lay out the sleeping bag, the blankets. The material is still damp from the relentless snow still drifting above their heads, but they lie on them anyway. Cocooned. Safe.

John notices Sherlock shaking, the tiny vibrations pulsating to the surface in waves of relief and numbing.

“Come here,” he offers. 

Sherlock crawls towards him, removes his coat, slips into the bag beside John. Breathes. 

They both do and time is lost as they return their everything to their extremities, return to their own bodies as they lie as one organ. Breathing in the other.

After too many beats of silence, John is afraid Sherlock is asleep.

He isn’t.

And as Sherlock’s eyes flicker open, the hand inching forward towards his temple does not abort its movement but continues on its course unexpectedly. John brushes a wet curl out of Sherlock’s face and smiles as his eyes flicker closed again.

They can’t even hear the snow.

“I think we should play a game.”

The damp figure beside him groans. “Oh god. Not another one.”

But his alerted eyes open, all the same.

“Yep,” John chuckles. “Just… close your eyes and- well, just picture something.”

“Too vague.”

“Okay, a place then. Somewhere you know really well or- or somewhere you’ve never even been to before.”

The pigeons are reluctant to speak, although they have so much to say.

John waits while the mind aside him conjures fire and starlight and delves deep beneath the earth to seek their own impossible black hole. 

He waits for twenty nine heartbeats. 

“Yes? Got somewhere?”

His entire being is constructed out of sand, waiting to be moulded, corrupted, destroyed and washed away with an eternal tide.

The ocean can’t come soon enough.

“Yes.” The noise is barely a breath but it engulfs him.

“Describe it.” 

Sherlock inhales. 

“It’s- it’s summer, John. It’s warm on every bone of me and I am content to merely lie under it, forever, I think. There’s grasses and they tickle at my back and as I run my hand through them beside me they rasp drily against the air. I can smell the earth and the simplistic pleasure of the moment and oh- John. There’s not a car park in sight.”

The scent of industry and people and smoke has been eliminated. Everything hangs in a section of time that will not ever be rewritten in either memory.

“More,” it’s not even an exhalation. “Tell me more.”

“I think I can hear water somewhere - a stream perhaps - and although there are no trees and the sun should be unforgiving, exactly at this precise moment- exactly now there’s no discomfort. To my right there are fields and fields that I have never once set foot in and yet I know exactly how they taste, how the mud feels dry and caked between my bare toes. It’s bliss and I have never before been as harmonious with myself as I am currently. To my left there’s a bird of some description - small and singing as if it has been released from my very own throat and knows the exact sentiment I wish to portray - and also- oh. You. You- you’re. We. Yes- yes we’re on holiday. Just you and me. The rest of the population has faded into insignificance.”

John smiles. “We’re lying on your dry, raspy grass together, lazy under the sun.”

“Yes. Lying just like this.” Sherlock shifts closer to him so their knees and ankles intertwine, places a hand on his hip.

They stare into the complete lack of monotony in the other’s eyes and each has a language of his own that only the other can understand.

“We have a dog, though.” John speaks first. Ending the false infinity of the moment. “It’s chasing rabbits behind us. Destroying the uninterrupted earth gleefully and we don’t care.”

“You know I hate animals, John.”

“You wouldn’t hate this one.”

“Okay, fine. What’s your dog called?”

“Ours, Sherlock. It’s ours.”

“Yours.”

“He’s called gladstone.” He arches slightly, stiff with the cold and Sherlock can feel the muscles flexing under his palm. “And you would love him.”

The children talk of aging, bees, sunshine, companionship until the shriveled sun has shrunk beneath the skyline and the snow falls in darkness. 

The overspill of city glow occasionally glints against the white but the lack of light is all consuming and although the sky is tasteless and invisible as it crumbles, invisible when pitted against the sheer perfection of dead grass and dry mud, the snow, well. The snow falls on.


	7. 1991, May

The snow melted so, so long ago but the coldness remains. It sits in wait, hounding its prey.

It knows what most do not. 

The geese make lazy ‘v’ shapes with their comrades, never speaking, never singing: Merely illustrating the sky. They arrive and leave so swiftly it’s easy to forget they were ever present, but while their silhouettes breach the colour of the clouds, in those seconds, minutes that they exist in flight for only watchful eyes to see- then and only then does it seem like they are immortal, framing the sunset like they always have and forever will. They shall remain forever, but only in this short fraction of time.

They sit on the ledge and breathe in the welcome chill that swift nightfall provides.

They both appear as geese to the landscape. Nothing more. Transient.

Visitors that got lost somewhere near the exit.

Sherlock holds an opened pack of cigarettes.

“I stole them from Mycroft.”

“Your brother smokes?”

“Apparently.”

John bites his tongue and thinks of the tar, building and building until there is no more space for the air to fill, slowly drowning on dark, dark, dark.

Sherlock places one between his lips - so innocent before the fire is lit, so deadly - and tilts the packet towards him. Not pushing but waiting, inquiring.

The hand holding the box - so, so inconspicuous, deceptive - doesn’t shake or tremble and this decision chokes John more than the smoke ever would.

The sun hangs before them and as solid as it seems, John knows it is falling ever closer towards the horizon. 

They hear a horn being pressed and pressed and pressed, miles below their notice or their care and as it sounds out against the evening, the birds scatter and the noise penetrates further into every particle of dust. Angry, volatile people and their needy demands. 

It all seems to trivial, so pointless.

John accepts a cigarette.

When the fire _is_ lit and the danger masked by a dull, soft glow-- only then are they are allowed to breathe. The sun remains stationary and yet they know it has fallen since they last checked.

It burns everything in their lungs.

Obliterates.

Purifies.

Smoke against the warm skyline.

It doesn’t linger; it shifts and disperses until there is nothing and John wonders briefly if everything is momentary. Ephemeral.

John can feel the roughness of the cheap concrete beneath his fingers, abrasive and affirming. It feels like it could melt away into nothing with a passing rainfall - as if they could, they will - and yet might stand for thousands of years. It might see thousands of winters. He is jealous but also pitying.

He wonders what Sherlock’s coat would feel like under his hands. Or perhaps Sherlock’s hair.

He merely contemplates, although it would be pleasant to reach out, to touch. To ensure that his hand would not be met by air and sick foreverness. 

The geese have long gone.

They’re mostly silent tonight, although the smoke dances in the forms of whispered letters. It has so much potential. He could write essays into his dreams.

This is their language - a steady stream of inhalation and exhalation - and it speaks more than they need to, for now. More than they will ever need to.

They exist, they continue, they do not expire. 

Not quite yet.

They’re both contemplating things far too complicated, far too simplistic to be voiced aloud while the heavens rage on above them and all they can see is the dying light in their own eyes. In each other’s.

Lost in the smoke and the wisps of abandoned thought trailing through their heads.


	8. 1991, June

Tonight they lie and all the stars have forgotten them.

Sherlock thinks about how the wind must hurt, must _ache_ sometimes with the effort but it rarely stops. It gets hardly any recognition.

John thinks about a cacophony of things that hurtle around all the empty spaces in his skull, relentless and burning with insistent knowledge.

John inhales and words spill unbidden from his lips. “Have you ever thought about-”

He stops and his heart disintegrates with regret. The broken silence is unforgiving. He wishes he could blow away with the wind, aimless and forgotten but ever-present.

It’s fruitless to think that, perhaps, Sherlock’s lidded eyes are momentarily hiding the absence beneath as he drifts and drifts away from all of the places where his ears can detect sound.

“About?”

Fruitless.

John considers rising to sit, to stretch his weary limbs and rid himself of this pressure but it shudders within him and the only pathway to relief is his throat, his tongue, his lips.

He is all guilt.

“You know.” Sherlock doesn’t know. He can’t possibly until a burden is lifted and a curse is laid. “What you want to do with yourself. You must have some idea; you’re so extraordinary, you’ve got so much potential and- and I suppose I imagine that you have a pretty clear idea of what you want to do with it all. You could practically rule the world.”

He laughs. It sounds hollow, echoing forever between the empty cavern of his chest and the night and all of the birds he has ever seen.

Sherlock breathes and John knows he longs for a cigarette between his lips but all that remains are the discarded corpses of their distantly related cousins, strewn about the rooftop. mangled and broken beyond further recognition or purpose.

At least it’s not a cold wind.

“It sounds awfully mundane but,” Sherlock’s eyes remain partially closed and john simply burns to see the intensity of his irises. “I suppose, I would be fairly well suited to the position of a forensic scientist.”

“Mundane?” John’s mouth quirks and for a moment - a fleeting eruption of liberty - he forgets himself.

Sherlock hums peacefully. The planet turns on its axis but they are no longer present upon her surface.

“That’s not mundane at all.”

A solitary eyelid flickers open and John is scorched by the gaze he sees. It always sees everything but it fails to see this.

“What then, as you’re so quick to judge the sheer and obvious uncommonness and excitement that my ideal profession would provide, do you have in mind for yourself?”

The pigeons remained as silent as his tongue and the distant traffic far below them remained as vibrant and claustrophobic as his chest.

“Oh come, you must have some idea, John.” 

“Well.” The air particles quake under the presence of one syllable but Sherlock remains motionless. John allows himself to pretend that this- this statue swathed in the fabrics of seemingless immortality could never break under the force of his potential words. He imagines breathing his ambitions as softly as to not disturb the finest of all dust and he foresees, unbidden, the consequential wreckage of one Sherlock Holmes. “Uh. My parents want me to go into law.”

The figure beside him is marble, not yet moved by the hidden tides of John’s soliloquy. 

“But you don’t.”

“It would pay well, I imagine.”

The sunset passed hours ago and the darkness is seeping ever closer into their bones, inch by inch.

This silence is heavy with mingled reluctance and epiphany and he knows.

John hates him because somehow, he already knows.

It’s the quiet that pushes and it is unlike the contended absence of sound they have grown accustomed to. It suffocates.

“John?”

He doesn’t hesitate, this time. He doesn’t draw the smallest part of him into the icy depths before flinching back, as if burned. He doesn’t skirt nervously around the water. He plunges his whole self in.

“I’m going to join the military, Sherlock.” There is no sound left to be heard on this earth anymore. “The army. Fighting. Serving my country. I- I don’t really think I have a choice.” He imagined the stone surface would shatter as soon as the impact struck but the statue remains frozen. Paralysed. Halted in his impending destruction by trains of solid and illogical thought. “And I want to. God, I want to.”

They have always been content with muted languages but John has never wanted to breach another silence more. 

Sherlock’s face, tilted towards the heavens, is illuminated barely by the moon. He searches the inkiness smothering the sky above them with purpose, searching for the stars.

“They’ll be different stars, John. Out there.” He feels as if he should be gasping, reeling, but his lungs only draw the steadiest of breaths. “Different stars and even now when you fight the clinging darkness, ward off the black, as soon as you look at a star directly it vanishes. As if it was only there because it was burned into your retinas, your mind, your memory.”

Years stretch between them and John can already feel the shuddering chasm. 

“I don’t want-” Sherlock’s throat constricts and he knows he can’t trust himself. “I don’t want you to become just another star to me. Untouchable. Barely visible. Vanishing. Gone before I am even allowed to see your departure, to join you. And.”

Sherlock’s speeches are so regularly fluid but now it falters, breaks, stops.

“I suppose, the only question I have- really and at this precise moment, for I shall surely conjure up an infinity of unanswerable curiosities before long, before you and I, before you, well- the only question I have is, how long?”

John doesn’t allow himself the trivialities and all encompassing destruction that are his words.

“For how long have you wanted to potentially throw your life away for-” The statue’s facade is cracking. “For people who will never even care about you? Not as much-” Crumbling. “As much as I do right and exactly in this one moment and all of our moments, past and future, because that feat, I find, would be impossible.” Fading into dust.

John opens his eyes slowly, unaware that they had even shuttered closed under the complete agony of everything.

He feels the blanket beside him seeping warmth into the chilling air, mingling with his own breaths although it now lies empty.

He sees the corner of a dark coattail lick around the doorframe which seems to only repel the dying paint that clings to it so desperately; hears the clattering, uneven footsteps of a boy chasing himself as much as running away down forgotten and abandoned staircases that have not collected dust until this moment.

John glances upwards and notices that there are no stars tonight.


	9. 1992, September

The golden colours dashed across the clouds are a juxtaposition. A contrast. Wrong.

It’s autumn and the horizon breaching the skyline is fair, dappled with light.

Somewhere, someone dies.

Ordinarily, the world maintains its composure and continues. Perhaps it mourns for a brief period, but we are and only shall ever be mere ants; a death, a birth, it continues the cycle and in such the same manner, the planet prevails. It doesn’t shatter under every loss.

It should shatter in this moment, however. And yet it remains intact.

The sky remains a perfect, shining hue, even above all the bloodshed.

The air should be growing colder, bearing all of this as it does. But it withholds its temperature.

Nothing is affected, it seems.

John ascends, bites back the ice in his throat and climbs for as long as it takes. He will shoulder this alone.

And yet he knows - when he steps onto the summit of the highest of the greatest low he has ever approached and the warm wind buffets him far too gently - he knows that he shall be met with a boy ( _nearly a man now_ , he realises with a sharp pang of something entirely unpleasant) who can read the smallest of occurrences from the nail of his right index finger. From the speed or rhythm of his breathing.

And he knows, with certainty, that he shall not be met with blind ignorance.

John sees the perfect silhouette, tarnished somewhat by the trail of smoke emanating from his lips but perfect nevertheless, and all the words are lost to his tongue. Foreigners here.

“Your mother.” Sherlock states. He doesn’t turn around - out of fear of what he will be met with or out of indifference John is still unsure.

“Yes.” It is a wonder the word arrives at all.

They rarely touch and yet when John is received by the awkward embrace filled with far too many limbs and things never said, he clings desperately. He imagines he can feel the wool beneath his fingers disintegrate under the pressure of his grip and float aimlessly into the streets below, forever searching, yearning for something but he could never, will never decipher what.

All of the salt he valiantly kept contained, hidden from the prying faces of all of every other human being to ever set foot upon his planet until this moment-- All of the salt spills forth from his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and he is drowning in the pure relief that the sobs wracking through his chest provide so willingly.

He thinks idly of how he thought he could keep them also from Sherlock.

He thinks idly of how the earth is illuminated by the soft glow of autumnal nightfall and how his mother has will not be seeing it.

He doesn’t know why he grieves but, he supposes, it is the constant, the routine of the steady push and pull of regularity and life that he mourns. Not the person, the soul. For he believes that withered and died quietly within itself years ago, so feeble and gradual that nobody noticed the departure until they realised the absence of it. The alcohol didn’t drown his mother, but it helped to mask, to flood the hole where she had once stood.

If John’s heart was dying, Sherlock would surely notice.

But no. Nothing else dies tonight although everything is aching with bereavement.

When the coat has fallen beneath his lax fingers and the tears have dried in tracks down his face that should-- they should gouge, burn his skin but they only remind-- Sherlock withdraws himself from John and back into his very being, his shoulders hunched slightly with discomfort.

“Your mother. She was.” He is alienated. “Was it perhaps. How was she when. Well. Well I hope that. I suppose. Maybe, I. It was peaceful, I take it?”

It deflects but then, it was never meant to pierce.

“You never talk about your family, Sherlock.”

“No.”

“Perhaps you should.”

They retreat to the safety of the corner - their corner - the harsh edges hidden under seas of blankets and familiarity. Routine. They lie for a while.

“My mother is- well. She has grown to disassociate herself from us, from everything unimportant, it seems but. I mean. I suppose there are undertones of care, of fading loving but I don’t long for it to return with vibrancy or even for it to morph back into something resembling warped existence, perhaps. And yet I do miss it. Terribly.”

The sun hasn’t yet set. It’s unusual but their regularity was interrupted, if for a short while, and time slowed, sped, merged into one singular pathway of thought until it vanished altogether, like a failing mind immediately preceding sleep.

“I’m sure you can remember when my father died. Or perhaps you don’t; it wasn’t particularly momentous. It was an event. It occurred. I survived it. I assumed - naively - that my mother would perhaps change after his death but she only managed to bury herself deeper. It’s possible she buried a part of her alongside him, which is the reason why I felt anything at all resembling guilt towards the events leading to his sudden demise - not remorse but regret. It changed us all slowly, in a way. For that I can only apologise. For me.”

They recline on a sleeping bag, sharing a cigarette. Time is still lost and the sun has still not set, although they can’t see it. Its light has been simultaneously hidden and dispersed everywhere all at once by the clouds that gather and gather but never obscure, and night - for once - is patient.

Sherlock’s words, his tone wash over John, through him. Never penetrating his thoughts but brushing gently by, directing and nurturing them into something coherent and partially whole.

“Don’t you see, John? We’re painting with a palette that is never going to be our own and we are merely the brushes. This,” He gestures to the sky, the clouds, the sun held forever in perpetual omniscience. “This is the canvas, but it’s not ours and we have no control over what we paint. Mere tools. But essential ones at that, don’t you understand?”

John doesn’t think he does.

He nods.

“We can’t alter our futures - together, whether they collide or drift, together at least we’ll remember us - we can’t alter them but we can decide how and in what manner to survive them. Together, never forget that. Promise me you will think of me in times when we’re say, both old - or only you, I don’t mind - and our fates have been tethered to some star we do not wish to travel-- Promise me you’ll remember that the only method of survival is continuation and resilience until the star slows and stops and you can see none of the angels and only your own two feet. I ensure you in this moment that I shall be beside you in every moment until the earth consumes us: Whether in physicality or not is a mere trivial matter, but I shall remain there, nonetheless.”

Sherlock is blindingly comforting for a being who claims to have no compassion.

The pigeons don’t exist anymore, not tonight.

“And when we do hear them - the angels, that is - when we can see and feel their closing breaths on our skin, feel their tiny hands closing around our throats and we know that an ending is inevitable, please remember that we crafted angels of our own once - here, together - and that we will have never been afraid of starlight, in the entire duration of our lives. Remember that- that I, a mere mortal on a larger scale, am with you and I swear-”

John’s phone ruptures Sherlock’s words shrilly and the noise of it permeates the space, fills it like it has every right where it has none.

“Harry.” Sherlock breathes.

John doesn’t answer either his friend or his phone but stands, ignoring the protestation of his weary bones. His footsteps sound out rudely as the descending stairs flying beneath him are passed and every noise feels like a violation.

The sky seems lighter than usual.

Somewhere, someone dies.


	10. 1993, July

Eighteen years ago, an unremarkable child was born.

And yet, Sherlock thinks, he was not unremarkable at all. Not even in the barest sense.

This child - this boy - could create entire universes with his voice if he so wished, could change an icy wind to merely a sweet summer breeze with a singular blink, could put searing warmth in a heart so cold no one had dared try before. He is the air which everyone takes for granted and yet all would simultaneously expire without him. He is- he is the saved and the saver. The craved. The loved.

John ascends the building and thinks that eighteen years ago today, someone completely unremarkable was born. And yet it is an event he is thankful for, nevertheless.

In his right hand he carries a bottle of cheap wine, in his left, vodka. It runs in the family, it seems.

It’s early for them, unusually so, and the sunlight hasn’t even begun to fade.

Sherlock waits with his back to the door and his face to the clouds, although he doesn’t expect his companion tonight. Despite this, John ascends still.

So when he hears the creak of a door hinge that should be so forgotten, so lost to all of the possible timelines of the past and so underused, he smiles slightly. He is so rarely surprised.

“Happy birthday, John.”

He is met by a grin - not necessarily born from gratitude or happiness but aching relief. Nothing and everything is sacred. This is their undying requisite for each other.

John raises the bottles in response.

His smile falters as he sees Sherlock’s expression: All rolling, turbulent tides and a darkness that does not repel but smothers, consumes.

Sherlock’s eyes flick to John’s hands. “Why are you here?”

His eyes close briefly, as if reading the insides of his subconscious mind for an answer of use. “Uh, well. It’s our night, you know. I wouldn’t miss that for anything and- and, well, you’re the only person I really want to spend my birthday with, anyway.”

“Not your family?”

“Not my family, no.”

They sit with the wine opened between them. Talking, although they don’t say much.

“It’s funny, I suppose.”

Sherlock quirks an eyebrow. “What is?”

“Me and you.”

“What about us, John?”

“Well, we’ve not exactly got the most conventional friendship. And yet there isn’t- there hasn’t ever been anyone else for me, really. I mean, sure, I’ve had friends but that seems too meek and insubstantial a word to call what we have.”

The quiet is all-consuming but tonight they relish in it.

And when the sky finally calls down to them, everything looks like a seascape without the waves.

The bottle becomes steadily lighter in their hands.

John is stretched out now, sprawled across what could only be described as their nest, his limbs flung haphazardly, carelessly. He is unselfconscious here. Sherlock pillows his head against John’s right bicep.

“Are you a virgin, Sherlock?”

His head feels too heavy. “Hmm?”

“Have you had sex? Y’know, with anyone.”

He shakes his head loudly, messily. “I don’t see the point.”

“It’s weird, right, that there’s all of this,” John waves his hand lazily above them, around them. “And that- that people are having sex right now and we’re not. Like. I suppose what I’m trying to say is. Is. People do things all the time, by themselves, with each other and everything is happening all at once and no one really cares except what’s happening to them, in that exact moment. And that- well, that I know nearly everything about you sometimes but I don’t even know if you’ve had sex or what you prefer on your toast in the mornings or whether you even eat toast at all. I think it’s a problem.”

Sherlock doesn’t think to answer.

The silence drifts and morphs and flowers and spawns all over again, but the fluctuating nature of it doesn’t bother them.

“Are you?”

“What?” John peers blearily beside him.

“A virgin. Are you a virgin?”

He huffs. “No.”

“Oh. Right.”

The empty bottle is lost in a sea of concrete as John picks up the other.

Everything is liquid.

“So- what.”

Sherlock blinks. “Hmm?”

“What do you like, then?”

“What do I like? Having cold toes, solitude, the taste of coffee beans. You should be more specific, John.”

“People, like, uh. Girls, guys, both, neither. Because it’s fine, by the way. Whatever.”

“I know.”

“So-”

The sun swoops gently lower, lazy as is everything else this evening.

“Men, predominantly I suppose.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“No just- it’s okay, that’s okay. It’s fine, whatever y’know.”

Sherlock raises his head.

“And you prefer-”

“I don’t really have a preference.” His answer is hurried, far too quick and it breaks the gentle lull of their voices.

“Right.” They have both gravitated closer, far, far too close and their noses brush gently, dangerously. “Good.”

John’s heartbeat is repetitive Morse pounding through his veins, subtle but urgent. It sounds like cannonfire.

All the angels that ever have been simultaneously avert their gaze and stare intently downwards. This moment is not theirs.

Lips brush; a cruel caress that falters, hovers over the borderline of safety.

John forces himself to pull back with a desperate intake of breath.

“Sherlock,” It doesn’t sound like a name - his name - anymore. “After school I’m going to- going to go to university. Medicine. I’ll come and see you when I can, of course, of course I will, but. There are things that maybe I should have said. Before now. And it’s- it’s unnecessarily cruel to continue anything at all like this before I tell you that I. I suppose that now I’m here I have to. Look, I want to be a member of the military, the RAMC. I want to- to help people and I can’t. Here. You do understand, please tell me you understand, don’t- don’t make me choose, please don’t. I wouldn’t survive it.”

His words no longer sound like his own native tongue.

John has never seen Sherlock raise his voice, not once. Perhaps it’s the alcohol or perhaps it’s merely the enormity of the situation, but when the shape of his mouth hardens and his face contorts into something which can only be described as searing distrust, John squares his shoulders and bites his tongue and waits for the impending rainstorm of violently inflicted speech.

He doesn’t have to wait for long.

“Just go, John.” Sherlock barks out, suddenly sobered. “You promised me- _you promised me_ you wouldn’t talk of this again but you, the stupid, ignorant little boy that you are couldn’t, wouldn’t listen. You promised me you had changed your mind and yet here you are, here you _fucking are_ , waving all of your ideas of grandeur and dumb heroism in front of both our eyes and yet you’re so, so blind to what the truth actually entails. So no, I won’t make you _choose_. You have already chosen yourself and your answer is horrifically obvious. I couldn’t change your mind with merely the incentive of me.”

It hurts although, he supposes, it was always going to.

“Just go.” Everything that was once precious - not perfect and yet treasured all the same, worthless in the hands of another - everything shatters, turning the warm air crystalline and biting between them. “Please.”


	11. 1993, July

The roof is just like any other, today. The air crisp, fine, haunting. It betrays nothing of the events of the previous night.

These concrete walls are still wrought with the memories of so many years spent together, though. John can almost taste them.

The sleeping bags, the blankets, the notebooks so illegibly scrawled in-- It’s almost as if they were never even here. As if they’ve been burned, crumbled to ashes and dispersed amongst every secret tendril of the wind until even the owners are left not entirely remembering whether they truly existed or were conjured by a distraught mind, seeking comforts that will never be present.

Everything burns, here. Everything always does.

He so longs to see Sherlock’s dramatic silhouette outlined against their infinite, searing backdrop. But now the sky is grey and the light from the sun has been diminished until it resembles nothing more than a petering glow, dying, fading into an existence that only the blind can see.

John hopes his companion will join him, but he doesn’t expect.

Yes, the roof is just like any other today, except when he closes his eyes for the merest fraction of a second and suddenly-- Suddenly it is not.

He perches on the ledge until his bones and his muscles go blissfully numb with the cold, until he feels he has become a part of this seemingly ancient landscape, and he waits until night falls and then day breaks again but he doesn’t know what for. He wishes he could stay and witness every sunrise, every sunset. 

A stray leaf blows across the concrete and it’s so lost - they’re both lost here - and it fights fretfully against the breeze until it falls paralysed and decrepit at John’s feet. It has forgotten how to move.


	12. 1993

* * *

1993, July

* * *

John receives an email that night. He doesn’t recognise the address but he saves it anyway. It reads plainly, simply, as if the hand crafting the text couldn’t bear to leak any part of himself into the words, however insubstantial.

_One might imagine that I should perhaps feel admiration towards you, but I can only bring myself to feel contempt, if anything at all. I understand that I am not danger or excitement to you, John - not anymore, at least - but I thought I was worth more to you than this. A mere distraction until you became old enough to leave me, to lead the exciting and ‘brave’ life that you have always longed for. I should hate to tell you it will be nothing of the sort, but your ignorance allows me to experience only spite. Yes, I am jealous of your future existence, naturally I am; it is entitled to see you mature and grow where I am not anymore. But I can no longer look into your eyes with the knowledge that in the end, I was worthless to you. I can no longer see the face that I guarantee will be haunted and changed and I can no longer remain by your side when I can only imagine what trauma you will experience to be rid of this. Of me. I can no longer bear to be in your presence and thus, any attempts to find me will be fruitless. Isn’t it strange that, after all this time, I can’t even dignify this with a ‘goodbye’._

Abrupt.

Cutting.

A means to an end.

* * *

1993, July

* * *

John imagines that this existence, this- this survival should be awash with greys and muddy browns but the light of summer clings to him, nevertheless. He doesn’t know how to ignore the life, the spatterings of sunlight, the sounds of lazy heat. He doesn’t know how but if he could, he would.

The cherry blossom doesn’t fall this early, but he can imagine it crunching underfoot all the same.

He takes his final few exams but he can’t recall the questions asked, or even the subject matter.

He finds himself adrift.

The sun - so fatuous and asinine - shines forever onwards, as if even the prospect of cooler and darker days is implausible. It binds him, tethers him with unwanted sweetness.

Sometimes he thinks of the pigeons. Sometimes of cool concrete and a position above all of the city pollution, closer to all of the gods and all of the stars and yet so far away. He doesn’t think of Sherlock.

* * *

1993, July

* * *

Term finishes. Some days he doesn’t give the future a single thought. In others, he gives it every last one.

His last remaining constant now is the thought of rain to freeze his skin and to drown out the unrelenting meekness of sunlight in favour of torrents upon torrents of water, searing his flesh and reminding him that yes, he is still living. But the only star he wishes he could not see remains and all his other constants have been diminished, washed away with the tides of cloud.

Still his mind wavers, uncertain.

* * *

1993, August

* * *

His grades are okay, in the end. Average, but not terrible.

Sherlock’s will be excellent, he thinks, and immediately berates himself for doing so. He cut this thread, this tie to his only anchor - they were each other’s, after all - and no matter how inadvertently, it was by his hand. He must accept that.

He doesn’t accept that he loathes this separation.

Not yet.

Instead he pretends that he relishes in his freedoms, his choices; although, he supposes in retrospect, they were always his to make.

The rain doesn’t come.

* * *

1993, August

* * *

The sun’s warmth begins to relinquish at last, albeit slowly. Like a small stream allowing water through steadily, peacefully, flowing inconspicuously towards angry, crashing waves. Or like time, a clock, a stopwatch: Hours feel limitless - a lifetime, almost - but in the last few minutes the crescendo hits and everything anyone has ever wanted to accomplish is unachievable, unreachable. All everyone can do is stare at the time ticking mournfully on towards its own, inevitable end.

The last few seconds of his clock, John considers, have already passed.

The last few grains of sand.

There’s nothing much to cling to here, so he doesn’t try.

Yes, the sun’s warmth begins to fade, just like everything else. John feels a twinge of guilt deep within some indefinable part him.

He has no right to feel guilty, he reminds himself. Although he does. He really does.

He has no right.

He has no right.

He has no right.

He repeats it like some kind of mantra - a prayer, of sorts - although he has no idea what it will achieve or to whom he is begging. Perhaps it’s not begging at all; perhaps it’s merely stubborn denial. But of course, he refuses to believe that. It’s ironic, really. Inescapable.

Oh, how he longs for the rain.

* * *

1993, September

* * *

The clouds break, all at once.

He has decided.


	13. Emails

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: It’s raining.  
Date: 12/09/93

Il pleut, as you might say. Refreshing. 

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: Still raining.  
Date: 14/09/93

When it was hot, really hot, I thought it could rain for days and I’d never be satisfied. But it’s just boring really. Funny how you think you know what your opinion will be in the future, how you’ll act, but when it comes down to it you don’t really know yourself at all. 

I smell of damp.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: Rehab.  
Date: 24/09/93

Harry is in rehab I should add, not me. Don’t panic. Just thought I’d let you know. I’m not even sure you check this email - or, in fact, if it’s actually yours - but it’s sort of therapeutic I suppose. Maybe you’ve flagged me as spam. 

Isn’t she a bit young?

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: The weather  
Date: 27/09/93

How dull. How british. You’d get annoyed if I said this to your face but hey, it’s sunny again. Won’t last, though. I’ve learnt nothing does.

Well, you’d either get annoyed or conjure up some timelessly beautiful metaphor about the clouds or something. The stars that are hidden but forever waiting. The light that reaches everything but never really touches.

When it rained, your words were my sunlight.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: That one summer  
Date: 04/10/93

We found that spot when you were eleven.

Do you remember?

It wasn’t even a particularly groundbreaking moment. We just- did. It was as good a place as any could have been, really. Cold, quite miserable, private.

Ours.

The rain was the worst part.

It was a few months after I had led you away from those boys. I had said, “Why didn’t you just walk away?” Because you could have. They wouldn’t have dared to follow you further. And you had looked me in the eye and said, “Because they’ll still be there tomorrow,” and, “there’s no where really for me to go.”

I think that’s when I realised that I. Well. I’m not entirely sure what I realised, but it was definitely something. Perhaps that if I didn’t break eye contact then, if I didn’t glance away to never look back there was potential for something revolutionary. That I would lose something irretrievable, but I didn’t quite know what.

I was glad to see it go.

It’s funny really: We thought it would last forever, our own private haven of fantastical separation and escapism. Because that’s what we were to each other, at first. A voice who listened. Nothing more.

We grew, though.

The top floor of an unused multi-storey carpark. A stupid idea, in retrospect, but without it - without you - I’m not sure I’d still be here. So thanks, I suppose.

I can still imagine the taste of the air, up there. The sound of the pigeons nesting in the heart of such an ugly, concrete structure. The sound of home.

All of my greatest memories are from up there.

I miss you.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: The green eyed monster which doth mock  
Date: 09/10/93

I think I’m jealous of you. 

I’m not jealous because you’re distanced from me, or because of your achievements or your intellect. 

No, I’m jealous because you are allowed to hear the sound of your own voice.

I can remember it, of course I can. I think it’s the nicest voice I’ve ever heard. In fact, I know it is. I can remember it, but nothing is ever the same, rattling around your own skull. You need to hear it, to feel the miniscule vibrations to make you really, truly remember.

To properly remember, you need to not have to remember anymore. If that makes any sense.

I wonder if you talk to yourself.

I wonder if you talk to a me that’s not actually there. 

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: trick or treat  
Date: 31/10/93

I’m almost certain you don’t read these. And if you did once, you definitely don’t anymore.

Because if you did, you would have surely replied by now. It doesn’t take this long to construct a comprehensible answer. It just- It doesn’t.

Happy halloween. 

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: Poetry.  
Date: 12/11/93

I’ve been reading poetry and thinking about you. Us. 

I thought I should let you know, although I couldn’t ever tell you what it is I’ve read. You’d loathe me even more, I think.

And I did give you cause to loathe me, I understand. You think I think you were nothing. Someone to not be so lonely besides and you were so much more significant than that. But because I gave you reason to hate me, a small part of me ended up hating you, somewhere along the way. Hate bred from selfishness. From separation and too many nights left staring at my ceiling, wishing I was somewhere I could see the sunrise. 

Not just anywhere, mind.

You know where. 

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: Um.  
Date: 13/11/93

These have become too revealing. I should stop writing them - or at the very least, stop sending them - but it thrills me a bit. To know that you might be on the receiving end of everything I never actually said, but meant to. Or even that you might remember me, one day; a spare thought stood stark against the repetition of the whirlwind that is your life now (I hope to God it is your life now), check these emails, picture my face. I’d quite like that, even if I never know. 

We used to think repetition was a good thing. Solid. 

It’s just bland.

We also used to think that what we had up there was repetition when in truth, it was the most unpredictable, the most unrealistic and frightfully perfect thing imaginable. 

I regret what I said, I do.

I don’t even know where you live, after all this time. If I did, maybe I would follow you, make sure you’re still breathing. I’m not sure I am. Or maybe I’d try to avoid the place and all thought of it. To banish the merest idea of you, existing elsewhere right now, right this moment, in a piece of space and yet within the same time frame to me but so, so unreachable. Existing without my presence. It’s a strange thought.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: The weather (again)  
Date: 29/11/93

It’s snowing! 

Do you recall the winter of 1990? Of course you do - you’re you. Stupid question. I was fifteen and you were fourteen. You know that too. Maybe I can’t help myself. I’ve grown lazy in my observations, of speaking the obvious without you correcting me. 

It snowed then. We talked about grass and sunshine and us. I think - and I hasten to say it but - I think that’s the greatest memory I have. I used to think sometimes, albeit naively, that we would do that, one day. Lie out on a lawn somewhere and listen to the sound of water, to our dog (this is the point where you would tell me it’s mine, it’s my dog but you’re wrong. you’re still wrong.) and simply, pleasantly exist with nothing burdening us. Only each other and the sky and the earth. 

Occasionally I forget that we dreamt that place up. It is a memory of a fantasy, not an actual event. 

It was snowing.

Are you under the same snow that I am now? Perhaps we’re looking at the same cloud.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: And again. Tedious.  
Date: 03/12/93

It’s all turned to slush. It’s disgusting. Who ever decided snow was a good idea. A good thing to write poetry about. It’s cold and miserable and ugly and tarnished and I want to see the pavements again. 

You know me. Never satisfied.

I imagine it would be quite nice to watch the fading light glinting off the dying, dying snow from our rooftop.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: Cherry blossom.  
Date: 15/12/93

For some reason, whenever I think of you I smell something distinctly rose-like, but not exactly. It’s cherry blossom I think, but I can’t be sure.

The worst part is, I have no idea why. 

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: happy xmas  
Date: 25/12/93

Merry Christmas.

Mum used to make me a scarf for every Christmas, but. Well. I got some socks though. How thrilling. 

I hope you can feel my sarcasm radiating through this email.

I hope you’re reading this email.

Actually no, I don’t. That would be a bit weird. No more weird than me sending you them, though. 

That is a bit weird. Isn’t it.

I think my aunt put too much brandy in the pudding. I don’t want to be here, with my dull, dull, dull family and my aunt who is drunk and smells of tarragon and my dad who keeps staring at the chair where no one is sitting when really we don’t actually have enough chairs so I had to sit on the floor but no one is sitting there because we’re all trying to pretend that it’s a space which is being occupied and isn’t slowly gathering dust. I want to be celebrating my Christmas with you although that might be a bit awkward. No more awkward than this, surely.

All dust is is dead skin cells, really.

I have to imagine if her skin is slowly seeping into those cushions, lining the arm rest. We have all silently agreed not to touch it, somehow.

I didn’t even like her, Sherlock. I loathed her. I absolutely, completely loathed her but I can’t help noticing the empty space.

There’s too much empty space around me, now.

For a second I forgot that you weren’t filling some of it. I do that quite a lot.

I used to think

some part of me

just a little part of me mind. maybe my little toe.

but some dayts i used to believe that i loved you and in others i was so completely deluded to think that you even loved me bacjk and i could lose myself in the starlightr that was your eyes and that would be ok because i woyld be allowed to in that alternate universe, just like you would be allowedc to look into mine

i’m slowly forgetting all the colours of your irises 

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: I’m sorry  
Date: 26/12/93

I regret everything I wrote. I woke up this morning and recalled watching my fingers hit the keys and electronic text fill the white space but. I wasn’t aware of the enormity of the regret I would feel.

I’m sorry.

If by some miracle you’re still reading, if you stumble across this in ten years, please know that I am sorry.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: happy new year  
Date: 01/01/94

Happy new year, Sherlock.

This will be my last one. I can’t keep doing this.

It’s getting ridiculous.

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 01/01/94

Happy new year, John.


	14. Emails Part 2

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 01/01/94

Shit.

You’ve been reading them.

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 01/01/94

Yes. I found it allowed me to sustain our connection, even if it was one sided. I apologise for not replying. I have no excuse, other than my unheard of juvenile traits.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 01/01/94

Unheard of?

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 01/01/94

To most, I imagine.

I assume that by this point you have signed up for a full length of service. Seven years, isn’t it? And proceeding that, supposing you wanted to see the ‘front line’, so to speak, a further thirty months.

I won’t see you until 2001.

I hope you won’t harbour any resentment towards me for saying this, but I have no desire to see you during this period. It is for entirely selfish reasons, but I simply can’t. It’s illogical (and impossible) I know, but it would completely and utterly destroy me. And if the next time I see your face is bruised and bloodied, unconscious in a hospital bed, so be it. Or, perhaps, flashed briefly in a newsreel commemorating the brave fallen. They’ll only give you two minutes, three at best.

Others might call me cruel, but you know me well enough to understand that I am merely being realistic.

You know me best, after all.

It is expected of me, perhaps, to congratulate you, admire you for this decision. Unfortunately, the best I can possibly muster is a distanced respect for your own choices, and a hope that you will return to me the same as you are now (you won’t, but this is irelevant, given the circumstances).

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 02/01/94

No.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 02/01/94

I mean, I didn’t. I haven’t. I’m not going to. You’re right; it was idiotic and I suppose that everyone will always want something greater than what they have, but in this situation I’d only be losing the best I could actually need. This decision isn’t entirely based around you I hope you realise, you great git. But you are a factor.

Maybe my subconscious mind values my survival instinct more than my conscious one does.

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 02/01/94

Oh. I didn’t preempt this outcome. It’s pleasing.

I would say thank you but, of course, I am merely a factor.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 02/01/94

Pleasing?

Pleasing????

I bet you’re dancing around your bedroom in your underpants right this second.

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 02/01/94

I don’t dance in my underpants, John. Don’t be preposterous.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: happy new year  
Date: 02/01/94

Deny all you want…

I’m still picturing it. The image won’t get out of my head, for some reason.

 

* * *

 

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: ‘Regret’  
Date: 16/01/94

You told me you regret saying what you did at Christmas.

That you were drunk, you couldn’t remember writing it, you weren’t meant to ever send anything of the sort to me, even if you thought it was an abandoned account.

You said it was regret, but you didn’t withdraw the statement. You never denied anything, but instead merely mentioned that you were berating yourself for saying things along that stream in the first place.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: ‘Regret’  
Date: 18/01/94

What are you trying to say?

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: ‘Regret’  
Date: 16/01/94

Nothing at all. It was merely an observation.

 

* * *

 

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: i miss it  
Date: 22/02/94

The roof, I miss the roof. You know, the colour of the sky above most of the air pollution and the sound of night and birds. The way the concrete was uncomfortable under our hands but we wouldn’t stop touching it, not for the world.

But I miss the roof with you.

I tried to go back yesterday and it was cold but the wrong kind of cold. I didn’t even make it up the first four steps.

We’ve been emailing (and decidedly not emailing) for about eight months and I miss us. Sorry, but I do.

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: i miss it  
Date: 25/02/94

I am of the impression that you didn’t want the dynamic between us to be restored immediately.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: i miss it  
Date: 25/02/94

You idiot, Sherlock Holmes. You complete and utter idiot.

You told me you didn’t want to look me in the eye ever again. So no, I was hesitant to rekindle our friendship too swiftly and it has been, as I pointed out, eight months.

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: i miss it  
Date: 28/02/94

I thought it was obvious that I had revoked my statement the moment you told me you weren’t going to fling yourself into aimless and destructive combat any time in the near future. Or ever, I hasten to add, if that isn’t too presumptive?

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: i miss it  
Date: 28/02/94

Of course it’s too presumptive! You can’t just map out my life for me, swathed in bubble wrap and permanently under your wing.

Also on a sidenote, you are terrible at replying to emails.

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: i miss it  
Date: 29/02/94

I want to keep you safe. Somewhat for your benefit but predominantly for mine. I won’t apologise for that.

And it takes time for me to construct a reply, John. I am reluctant to offend you further.

 

* * *

 

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: you. it’s a problem.  
Date: 09/03/94

Is it strange that sometimes I look up at the sky - if only to glance, to reassure myself that we do still exist on some plane or another and that the universe continues to hang above us, unchanging while everything below fluctuates and morphs constantly - and wonder if you are looking at the same hue of orange, the same cloud, the same constellation as me in that exact second? There’s always a possibility that you are, somewhere, where ever you are and that ignites something pleasant in my chest.

It aches a bit and it’s so ambiguous, I can’t actually work out whether it hurts or not. Erring on the border, perhaps.

I understand if you don’t want to go back there, I really do; whether by ‘there’ I am referring to the roof or the intangible place we found ourselves before-- I feel they are interchangeable now, anyway. But I do understand, completely.

It would just be nice to see your face. Your eyes. The stupid, poncy coat.

I’m drowning in all the empty spaces.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: mental.  
Date: 16/03/94

I thought I saw you today. There was someone on a street corner, smoking - that was the first indication - with hair just like yours and a collar turned up so the silhouette against the setting city light looked just like yours too. I’m seeing you in all the places where I never have done and I think some part of my brain is going just that little bit crazy.

Have you gone back, since?

Have all the blankets been returned? Because it’s raining like nothing I’ve ever seen and if they’re there, we won’t be able to salvage them, I don’t think. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking and it’s just the concrete that’s getting a good soaking. But I hope you have gone back.

I should too, really but I can’t, somehow. I don’t know why. It’s as if someone closed that chapter of me without my consent and I’m not strong enough to turn any of my own pages.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: really?  
Date: 07/04/94

You really are the shittiest person when it comes to replying to emails.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: ?  
Date: 23/04/94

It’s like I’ve gone back, sending emails to someone who’s not really there, sitting on the receiving end. Occasionally I wonder if I invented you replying to me as some sort of psychological net to keep me sane (of course, that suggests I never was too sane in the first place, but you get my point). Except I have everything in my inbox to prove it.

You’d better reply some time soon.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: i went back  
Date: 15/05/94

I went back to the roof today. There was nothing there except bird shit and the remnants of manufactured dust and the wind. It hurt a bit.

Where are you?

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: untitled  
Date: 31/05/94

Sherlock fucking Holmes check your goddamned inbox.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: i miss it  
Date: 23/06/94

Sherlock?


	15. 1994, July

The emails wrench out his throat, wring it dry. He chokes on everything he misses and everything he can’t get back.

The memory of the view from the roof burns his retinas.

The high is not instantaneous, but swift nonetheless. It shifts everything slightly out of his coherent perspective and entitles him the liberty of being able to breathe again. It tastes sweet.

This euphoria could potentially have been described as orgasmic, but Sherlock knows it runs deeper than that. Prickling and numbing and clarifying every vein, every synapse. Every pore exudes greatness but also relief. Is it freeing, trapping but only to fall into the familial comfort of the protective arms of the drug.

The intensity soars to almost unbearable levels and every heartbeat shudders through his entire skeletal structure, getting faster and faster with each breath although he isn’t really breathing anymore. He can taste it.

He distantly hears the sound of the clock coupled with his laboured breathing and it’s like music that drifts and ebbs slowly, swirling about his head in eddies that he can almost see the colours of if he strains his eyes enough. It makes his skin sing with the sensation of mere air particles reflecting off the surface, but it is enough, more than enough, no where near enough. Drifting through his brain, he wishes it would soften and blur but it only clarifies.

Somewhere he vacantly locates a cell, maybe two, screaming of the roof, of John, of all the moments that he can now never allow himself and he watches on disdainfully. It doesn’t affect him now. Nothing could.

He is no longer in the room but floating peacefully and yet simultaneously speeding towards his inevitable demise and he can see the colour flying past him but he can’t open his eyes, he can’t- the room is slightly off kilter, all senses fading into one and everything is blurred. He doesn’t even get a chance to blink before everything rushes back into focus and he thinks the sharpness will kill him, pierce his chest until he bleeds out on a carpet that was once there but doesn’t appear to be any more, only space.

All the infinities of the universe are beneath his hands, his knees, his solar plexus as he falls into nothing and everything combined.

His eyelids refuse to shutter closed and his jaw aches like he has been punched, beaten, thrown against solid oblivion time and time again. Perhaps he has.

A twitch shudders through his left hand insistently and he draws it shakily up to his face for closer inspection. It glows and there are six thousand fireflies just underneath his skin, dancing so beautifully while killing him, draining him as excruciatingly and as slowly as he can possibly imagine. They are vibrating and keeping perfectly still all at once. He envies them.

It drains, like a sieve slowly leaching all softness and anything good but slowly, as if to not disturb the gods or any other innocent being. It drains and Sherlock can feel it seeping out of his mouth, flooding his throat while he waits quite calmly to drown on it and on everything else but somehow his stuttering breaths are allowed to continue.

He decides rather suddenly that he doesn’t wish to see his nineteenth birthday. He doesn’t understand how it is possible to survive on force of sheer will alone, and how he has done it alone up until this moment, when he is almost-drowning on his own blood and the air. But of course, before this moment he never really was alone.

_John._

The word courses through him; a sick and repetitive fanfare, making every nerve jump and shiver, his body arch under the ministrations of his own rebellious mind.

He misses the pigeons and all the sights of every star that never really could be seen under so much light pollution and cloud covering, but the suggestion of them was there all the same. He misses the frightful cold and the warmth and the evening light and the oceans of blackness and the constant and forever presence of a soul so very, very in tune with his own that the notion of being parted from him for even a second seems ridiculous. But here they are. Eons apart, the merest hair’s breadth, fated to never combine or meet again in these timelines which have always been so cruel.

His cells have all become detached and hover in the shape of a form resembling who he once was, so long ago. They disperse and he is nothing, breathed into everyone’s lungs and forgotten like a stray flutter of wind.

Obscured starlight. A bruise.

He fades.


	16. 1994, July

The silence deafens.

It creates fictitious scenarios within John’s head, and they are always shrouded in dark.

It reveals nothing except his greatest fears.

He thinks of the roof, a memory which he does not allow himself much thought anymore, but he thinks-- he thinks of the air and the place beside him that was always filled except now.

He wonders if the future promises more air. More empty spaces.

At least, he thinks, he is something nearing the realm of the free, now. Burdenless.

So he tries to ignore the silence. The days flicking slowly into months. A blinking cursor that reveals only time passed, and non-linear at that.

But it deafens and burns his ears, his throat, winding behind his eyes and wreaking havoc down his spinal chord. He can’t lose this, he can’t.

It deafens and he’s already blind.

The chipped handle of the mug is cold, rigid beneath his fingers. He wants it to yield to him, to mould to the shape of his skin. He wants it to remain immovable and inanimate just so he can smash the pieces again and again; a turbulent infinity making the shards grow smaller and smaller between his hand and the wall.

Cold and the liquid within, untouched.

When the doorbell rings, his curtains are blockaded shut and his mind numbed to the noise after so many repetitions of its shrill call sounding off throughout the walls of a structure nobody really likes. He ignores it.

The dust lines the corners of his ceiling and he wonders how long it has been there. Lurking. Coating everything in a fine dusting of bland grey.

Again, the noise.

It resonates from inside his skull and it takes such, such a long time to reach his ears that by then, it is obsolete. He hears angry, resigned footsteps, softened by carpet and socks. He processes none of it.

“John,” it sounds like a repetition of the doorbell but laced with language that doesn’t quite seem to be able to permeate his thoughts. An angry call, along the landing and down fourteen stairs and through the hallway from the front door, a throat, a voice box, he knows the sound but-- It is nothing to him so he looks at the dust and continues to contemplate how long it has been settled for because none of it, none of absolutely everything concerns him.

“John, it’s for you.”

Somehow his tongue forms shapes and he interprets the syllables.

“It’s really not.” He wonders if his voice carried at all, if he even opened his mouth.

“John!”

It’s more insistent now so he moves - although he can’t remember doing so - away from the blinking cursor that hides so innocently all the barbed words he hasn’t had a chance to say.

His father meets his eyes as they pass in the narrow space at the bottom of the stairs. John fell down them once. Gave himself a black eye. Sherlock had just laughed.

“I didn’t even know you had friends.”

The words are muttered and blunted, designed to fill a silence as they brush shoulders and part once more but they jar him, dig beneath his ribcage because that _burns_. He never mentioned Sherlock to anyone within these four walls because they didn’t matter and he did, more so than everything and everyone combined. Yet now there is no one to acknowledge he even had an existence by John’s side in the first place and it is as if- it is as if none of it occurred, that it is all one long, tenuous fantasy which John grants himself because this sickening reality is far, far too harsh a truth to shoulder.

Because no. No, he doesn’t have friends.

Although he had one, once.

The man standing at the door boldly displays a pocket square, nestled comfortably among the three piece suit he adorns. He leans on an umbrella almost calmly, although it has the same effect as if he were brandishing it.

There is nothing here similar to Sherlock except a fiercely intelligent gaze.

And yet.

John knows that this can be no other.

“You’re here about Sherlock.” He swallows audibly.

“Yes.”

“What’s happened?”

The brother of a man he thought shared something with him a long time ago stiffens, but it is not against the cold.

“Shall we go inside?”

John thinks they should have tea for this conversation but the kitchen is years away and his father has been muted again into nonexistence. They sit and a clock marks time audibly as it ticks and progresses, progresses, slowly into the space where each man is holding his breath and the clocks have become still.

“I am apologetic that this news has not reached you sooner; I was aware my brother had strong,” His eyes flicker down the length of John’s body. “Connections with an individual named ‘John’, and believe me when I say that I had intended to find you sooner, but I became distracted by more important matters and it - you - faded into irrelevance. Given this new turn of events, however, I felt it would only be respectable to track you down after so much time to inform you, and perhaps request your presence. And besides, he asked after you.”

John’s fingers twitch restlessly against his knee and he stills them, disgusted with himself. The chair swallows him whole inch by inch.

“But is he okay?”

It seems the clock has sped up unbeknownst to them until this moment, where it almost shouts in urgency.

“I think one would have to define ‘okay’, in this situation. He is- I am concerned. Not merely for his present state, but also for his surely deteriorating mental faculties and the many future selves which could take form. None of which are particularly appealing to me. I am pleased, however, that after so much time I have met the sole person with whom he holds the utmost respect. That I am not the most prominent figure in his life; I would be a rather pathetic idol indeed, to follow. And that role has been replaced, in fact, by you. Somewhat bland, I admit, but I imagine you’re good for him. And he you.”

Mycroft exhales noisily. It shatters the rolling monotony of his voice and John imagines the clockface splintering under the ministrations of unexpected sound.

“You might think, John, that you are suffering most in your separation, but I can assure you it is not the case.”

The dancing around of the subject most precious to him yet almost most hateful begins to grate his bones together.

“Is. Sherlock. Alright?” The very air punctuates his anger. His confusion. “Where is he?”

“He has been hospitalised. Stable, but hospitalised. Bed ridden by the consequences of his own romanticised notions of drug taking. Of you too, I suspect.”

His own flurry of motion surprises himself.

He doesn’t take a jacket, but the air is pleasantly warm. The pavement unresisting beneath his feet. The trees sighing peacefully in a horrid juxtaposition, mocking him and everything he is tangled between.

One shoelace patters against the tarmac with every step, carelessly tied.

He doesn’t even remember to breathe.


	17. 1994, July

The phone rings and the sound makes John think his heart is stuttering.

“Hello?”

He waits and hopes in the space of maybe a second, two, and in those moments of failing and soaring heartbeats he recalls the all warmth he could - once did - feel, wrapped in all the comforts of that baritone voice and yet dismisses himself just as quickly because it’s a false hope, it’s a-

“Hello.”

“Sherlock,” He breathes, enveloped in silken honey and comforting heat.

“Yes.”

A pause.

“Mycroft bought me a mobile.”

“So I’ve gathered.” He’s still reeling, his mind and blood dancing together as one and he can no longer feel the insides of his wrists, the pads of his fingers. “It’s been a while.”

“Exactly a year, in fact.”

There are so many words, so many nights where one particular rooftop has remained empty but here-- the silence swells and plummets and speaks everything they need to.

“Are you still in hospital?”

“Yes. Mycroft thinks I. Well, I’m going to have to do. He believes I should go into rehab.”

“The cocaine.”

“I’m not addicted, John.”

“But-”

“It’s not even completely recreational. I don’t use for the effect on my body, but the effect on my mind and I am not addicted. But Mycroft-”

“-thinks you are.”

“Yes. Thank you for understanding.”

“I just don’t believe that anyone as strong willed as you could fall slave to something so mundanely chemical, that’s all.”

“Well. Quite right.”

There’s more static down the line, blurring into all the spaces between their silences and masking something intangible.

Sherlock inhales noisily and it makes the fine hairs on John’s neck stand on end. “So, John. How are you doing?”

“Good. Fine.”

“Liar.”

“Well, what do you want me to say?”

“The truth.”

“What, that I haven’t achieved anything in nearly six months? That I’m taking a gap year to get a handle on things and I have managed nothing? That I’ve halfheartedly applied to a few universities because I’m terrified that I won’t get in, terrified that I will?” John’s teeth grind together and he wonders absently if the ragged noise can be heard down the line. “I’m stuck here, lonely and more than a little bit despondent because there are holes in my existence everywhere, because so much of me is made up of other people that aren’t here. Some people might call me depressed but I think I’m just purposeless. I need to feel my own blood roaring in my ears, my face stinging with the wet and the cold, every breath burning the insides of my lungs I- I need to be alive, Sherlock. But here, lost in this shit hole that I like to call my own head, I am not living anymore; I’m barely surviving and I’m not fighting the pull of a lack of existence because it entices me so much. So yes. I am bloody miserable without you, if that’s what you wanted to hear. You bring me my life, you sod.”

It’s quiet and John imagines he can hear a fretful wind whistling down the telephone, marking the passage of time spent without words where in reality there is nothing. He feels he should perhaps regret those words falling unbidden from his mouth but all he can muster is relief that they escaped at all.

“I miss you too.”

“Good.”

“I want to see you, to hear you to- to touch you. Confirm that you’re not just a voice to me. A hallucination or incredibly vivid dream that isn’t really real because all of my senses of you have been removed, one by one.”

“Me too.” John wonders if he made sounds at all, or merely moved his mouth and exhaled with the sheer weight of it.

“Cummings very aptly summed up a lot of things.”

“Excuse me?”

“Cummings. The poet. You know, ‘ _silently if, out of not knowable/ night’s utmost nothing, wanders a little guess/ (only which is this world) more of my life does/ not leap than with the mystery your smile-_ ’. You must have heard that.”

John can only breathe, immersed as he is.

“No.” And then, after a beat, “Don’t stop.”

“‘ _your smile sings or if(spiralling as luminous/ they climb oblivion)voices who are dreams,/ less into heaven certainly earth swims/ than each my deeper death becomes your kiss/ losing through you what seemed myself, I find/ selves unimaginably mine; beyond/ sorrow’s own joys and hoping’s very fears/ yours is the light by which my spirit’s born:/ yours is the darkness of my soul’s return/ —you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars._ ’”

“Oh.”

“Yes, I felt it fitted.”

“It does. It does exactly.”

“There’s more, I think, that I should - that I want to - tell you.”

“Go on, then.”

“It would take too much time.”

“I don’t mind, sherlock.”

“No it’s more than-- I think I want to see you when I. To look into your eyes and categorise, memorise your reaction. It’s more than can be said voice to mere voice, I feel. More than I want for now.”

“I think I understand.”

“You probably don’t.”

He snorts. “No, I think I do.”

“By using ‘think’ you’re indicating that all you have is mere speculation and in this situation if you speculate at all any of any minor thought then you. Do not. Understand. And you cannot possibly either replicate or simply mirror my beliefs on this matter.” The words are rushed, hurried, far too fretful and horribly ambiguous.

“No,” John says softly. “I do. I do understand.”

“Right.” It sounds like relief in one syllable. “Right, okay.”

The air sings between them, the distance separating their two hurried heartbeats simultaneously irrelevant and ever restricting but they accept it and it sings.

Silent.

Still.

Buzzing with the promise of a rekindled harmony.


	18. 1994, November

Just him, here. Him and the wind and his thoughts and so many pigeons he’s surprised still exist.

They existed without them, throughout what seemed impossible.

John thought the crisp air would bluster, sting, bite at his skin viciously until he is left with nothing but his bones but - despite everything it, he, they have both seen - it comforts him. Envelops him. Holds him securely together until it is only the barest of fastening that still whips dangerously about, where all secrets and blood in his frame could pour out of. Could, but don’t somehow.

It’s cold, punishingly so, but he barely feels it. He imagines he can see the all leaves on all of every tree below him slowly dying, decaying, falling from their perches to form a foaming, angry sea of orange that falls placid with the barest touch.

Yes, it’s cold but not quite as miserable as he expected.

The weekly phone conversations have helped, triggering something to unravel deep beneath his ribcage. Their previous dynamic isn’t retained but is growing slowly into focus, nonetheless.

Like an echo.

Or a hand reaching to hold, to grap, to reinstate its presence and yearning, stretching forever but- but never quite touching.

If only- if only they could touch, see, hold forever with warmth and mutual togetherness. Then perhaps - and only then - would it - they - be fully restored. Made whole by the other. A voice down a telephone is a terribly hollow thing, after all.

John needs to feel heat beneath the pads of his fingertips or perhaps rough, unforgiving, grey wool against his cheek and he- he needs that human, reaffirming contact that Sherlock might ridicule with all his might but, at the end of the day, needs it more than most. More than John does.

Perhaps, he thinks as he burrows his hands deep within his coat, perhaps he could fill his pockets with this air (and only this air, for no other is worthy of comparison) to keep and treasure and inhale little sips of forever until all that can be left is empty space.

This air though; it’s too wild to be caught, too living, it’s seen too much.

He fills his lungs with a cold that could not be less earthy and less contained and pretends - if only for a searing, perfect moment - that there is a firm body pressed against his back, a slender yet large milk-white hand tracing the veins on his neck and another holding his shattered solar plexus together as he breathes in and in and in and in and-

But there is not and there is only the wind and the kind of darkness that you can only feel during the day.

He will touch, hold, see, feel the burning gaze of Sherlock only next month and he aches with the anticipation of it, with the anxious terror that burns away every fibre of him like a fuse. Surely- surely he has grown dull, boring, worthless of anyone’s time in this separation. And yet he is certain that Sherlock - perfect and righteously arrogant and warm and _his_ \-- Well. He would never abandon him. Not wholly.

No, he is not John’s, though. He never will be, never can. He barely belongs to himself.

Sherlock is owned by the crystalline stars that wickedly form constellations too high to touch, by the blood contained in his heart, by the roaring traffic that drones through every moment of would-be silence and by an ocean that drips and drips but never gushes. There is no cage that could hold him. No hand that could be bound to his. No mind that could be loved as an equal.

So John breathes and instead appreciates the twinge of faint hopefulness diffusing into his veins, of a tomorrow, of an uplifting promise and wish all blended into one solid - yet entirely intangible - breath.


	19. 1994, December

The temperature has plummeted, but he doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t feel the minute trembling of his fingers, although he’s aware it’s there. He feels nothing but his feet on solid, impermeable ground and the anticipation winding, curling throughout his abdomen.

The hand on Sherlock’s shoulder - poised to appear as a comforting gesture but it is more similar to a touch one would give to an unpredictable stallion, containing, forcing, a presence that cannot be wiped clean - abruptly leaves and as he hears Mycroft’s perfectly tailored shoes pattering down the path he becomes very aware he is standing in an ocean.

His hand, waving and weak before him, rises to meet the knocker but falls flat to his side.

The wood grain is intricate and impossible to recreate. It dances, swims in his vision and he feels like he is just on the precipice of falling, hurting towards the ground which will no longer be a solid presence at all but instead a fluid one, a gaping mass of nothingness of which he will fall and fall and fall into until he has reached the bottom of the earth’s most ungodliest pit and even then he will not be far away enough but falling, well, falling is not perhaps the most desirable option and god--

Just on the other side. Just there. He is breathing air that has whispered across _his_ skin so very recently and he fancies he can taste John on it.

He raps twice with his knuckles, sharp and succinct. It betrays nothing. Good.

He waits for approximately twenty seconds. It feels like decades. It feels like half of a heartbeat.

The door opens and the quick intake of breath is the reunion's only fanfare. It could have been issued from either one of their lips.

He feels John’s eyes steadily boring into his and in answer he raises his head. Sherlock’s every cell screams but he isn’t entirely sure whether it is to fling himself forwards or back.

The silence stretches and wavers, hangs between their mouths and their eyes, pretending there is nothing there at all except a comforting quiet.

It lies.

John steps aside, offers him tea. He refuses. There is nothing substantial to note except Sherlock’s footsteps feel like water on the carpet and as he drifts he feels as if he should know this place that holds so many memories he never experienced, but are dear to him nevertheless. Nothing substantial.

They sit in chairs on either sides of the living room, Sherlock with his back to the bay window. The emptiness behind him haunts, somehow. Reminds him of places untravelled, forgotten. Discarded.

John clears his throat and he tenses his ribs, bites his tongue. Forgets to breathe.

“Sherlock.” A statement, nothing more.

He glances upwards, only now realising his gaze has been trained on the finer particles of the carpet (worn, in use over seven years, wool, polypropylene, cotton). Everything is wrong and slightly disjointed, slightly out of focus.

“Uh, you look well.” John’s voice is carefully welded closed - blank and ambiguous and horribly unfitting - but his face is drawn so tightly across his features and his eyebrows pitched so sharply together that sherlock is concerned his entire being will shatter into thousands and thousands of irretrievable pieces, embedded in the carpet.

He allows a sharp breath to be released from his chest; it could be interpreted as a demeaning, scoffing noise, he thinks, if his throat didn’t feel so scarred and constricting. “What?” A heartbeat, two. “Were you expecting to be met with the broken and distraught face of a serial drug abuser? Someone you could nurse so lovingly back to health? I’m not broken, John.” _but i am, i am_ his lungs scream _just not by what you think_. “Don’t patronise me, coddle me. I told you, and I am. Fine. There’s nothing for you to fix here. Nothing that needs taking care of. Nothing that needs to be loved. So don’t- you can’t try. There’s no point. I don’t need you; I am here of my own volition and surely, surely that should be enough.”

His mouth shuts with a soft click.

It is the crack of a gunshot within these four walls. They compress all of the other noises.

“I wasn’t going to say-”

“Yes, you were.”

“Right.” The space between them draws them closer, hems them in. The room is too big. “There’s a cafe nearby if you want to-”

“Yes.”

“Alright. Okay.”

They stand, leave. John shuts the hollow house and locks it away to be contained within its hollow self and all of the hollow words and memories. It seems smaller now, from the outside.

The pavement sings under their shoes and the cold air blisters away any sense of stagmentation. Sherlock wonders if the cafe is close, closer still, and thinks that he would much rather merely walk and walk in this freshness until he collapsed with John on his left and all of the rest of London on his right.

But there it stands, shrouded in a neon glow like a worship, a blessing, the warm sounds of coffee machines spilling out onto the street.

They sit.

Order.

The world passes by and they are safe here.

Sherlock smiles as he watches John coat his upper lip in foam, his hand twitching to brush it away. “Thank you for suggesting we leave the house. It’s- it’s better this way.”

“Yes, I thought so.”

A noncommittal noise. “So. How’s it been?”

John’s right eyebrow jumps upwards. “Without you? You arrogant sod.”

“Yes. Without me. Because without you it’s been frightful.” The confession should have been wrenched from his mouth, but the words feel natural.

“Oh.” They sip their drinks and watch the rest of the world beat the pavement angrily, hurriedly, never stopping to peer between the cracks. “Me too, um. I think maybe-- You’re a little bit all-consuming and I didn’t really notice you creeping in and becoming a part of me but - I suppose - when you suddenly weren’t there anymore everything was sort of grey and a bit irrelevant.”

The afternoon draws away slowly and they don’t notice the sinking horizon. Their coffees grow cold and they talk enough to fill the space of seventeen months. Everything is content.

John smiles. “I’ve missed you, you know.”

“Yes, I think I do.”

Their knees migrate slowly closer together under the table, although neither can remember moving. Neither pulls away.

Some time after five the shop is closed behind them and the air has grown even colder. They stop, unsure of which direction to take, and whether they should be taking it together. Sherlock studies John’s eyes, the skin behind his ears, his nose, his eyebrows, the muscles underneath his cheek.

His mouth.

John inhales noisily as if to break something, but everything remains intact. “So, uh, are you going-”

Sherlock moves, his face inches, centimeters, even less from John’s and presses his lips flush against him, applying the barest pressure but- but it is enough.

All the roses in all of the world have suddenly blossomed into infinite life and the reds and pinks and whites consume them both as they stand immobile and yet so very fluid and this- this moment could utterly destroy them or create something frighteningly yet brilliantly unknown.

When he pulls back, John’s eyes are closed.

When they open, all he can utter quietly is, “Oh.”

Sherlock bites his lip - cold now - and turns swiftly, his coat flapping dangerously around his ankles as he strides away.

Not once looking back.

Not once stopping to examine between all the paving slabs.

The moon rages with the sun and the city is still far, far from sleep.


	20. 1994, December

He goes to the roof. It holds all of their memories here, protects them. John hopes all of their future minutes and hours and years are too spent here - or perhaps not here, but together nonetheless - and some other skies will one day hold the whispers of dreams of a life that really did happen. That really was lived.

The idea tastes too sweet in his mouth.

Sherlock won’t be there. He tells himself, reminds, shouts inside his own skull. The sound reverberates hollowly. He won’t be there, silhouetted against the rolling backdrop of pale cloud, perhaps with a cigarette perched somewhat poetically between his fingers, his mouth. He won’t be there he - won’t - but some part of John _knows_ that he will and his skin sings with it.

So he climbs eagerly, apprehensively, and doesn’t know what will happen all the same.

Sherlock turns to greet him when he arrives, and John can see the panic, the worry embedded into every muscle, the regret threaded behind his eyes.

“Hello, John.” There is no cigarette, so all he can do is inhale cold, cold, cold, deeper into his lungs hoping against all of the birds surrounding them that it will freeze his blood and his bones and stop his fiercely beating heart. It betrays him.

“Hello, Sherlock.”

It’s quiet and they let the fading noises wash over them, between them, dissuading all of their uncertainties. John is still too far away.

Should the subject be broached? Tackled like anything should be with aggression and purpose that provides nothing but clarity.

Neither speaks and this silence is the furthest from comforting, from relaxed. It stretches between them, heart to heart, and neither wants to break it but neither wants to pull it nearer so they stand so closely, so distantly, tugging towards and away while the very air forgets to allow them to breathe.

“You, um.” John’s throat is too constricted to allow all the words embedded in his chest out through his tongue.

“I kissed you.” It is not a shocking statement. It is the truth.

“Yes.” He takes a step forward but John isn’t aware of his feet moving. The question pushes and pushes against the cage of his ribs. “Why?”

“Because I,” The possibilities hurt John’s head, his neck. _i didn’t know what i was doing,_ they provide for him, _i made a mistake, i was thinking of someone other than you, i was saying goodbye, i was persuaded by every atom in the universe and they mocked me john; they lied and i was wrong to listen, i was experimenting, i was a fool._ “Because I wanted to, John.”

He can feel both of their chests, their hearts shattering in this one instant and although it’s painful, it’s more elegant, more perfect than he would have dared to dream.

“Oh.”

The space between them hums with current but here- here it’s just them, left to themselves in a world where everything but their minds have been switched off, left, forgotten under eons of roots and leaves and nature’s cruel copulation with time.

Sherlock clears his throat, his feet stepping once, twice against weathered concrete, as carefully and deliberately as if he walks a tightrope, as if he walks the clouds themselves. “If you wouldn’t be averse,” Another step would bring them close enough to feel the heat of the other’s skin. “I would quite like to do so again.”

Oh, how John would fling himself forward if it weren’t for the restraint of his mind. _it is a mere trick_ , it reminds him. _it’s a game, he’s laughing at you beneath his pale complexion and eyes of every star so foreign to your plainness, a test, an experiment, this will wring you dry and leave you so hollow, so bereft of any heartfulness you will have nothing left to bleed, you’re ignorant, ignorant and blind, he could never- he would never want- to hold you close to his chest for decades to protect and cherish as much as you long to hold him._ So he feigns ignorance, and within it finds security and the pretence of control.

“Do what again?” His blinks become reduced, like a shutter speed increasing and increasing but simultaneously slowing at the moment of most movement, most activity, to capture to the finest detail and retain, restore, preserve. The earth is moving far too slowly and far too fast.

Sherlock quirks his mouth, rolls his eyes mockingly but John doesn’t miss the tautness of cheek or the furrows above his brow. “Don’t be dense, John.”

He steps forward, crosses the distance as effortlessly as a plane would cross a turbulent ocean, miles below. John is left with salt across his hands and thick, inescapable water trapped within his lungs but he can’t breathe - he doesn’t have the time for air - as his mouth is pressed so gently against and the water is compressed and compressed until the pressure forces it to explode back with vigour, with response and shared feeling.

His fingers are clutched at Sherlock’s back, entwined with rough fabric and clinging onto this unstoppable, incredible force. Sherlock’s right hand cradles the back of his skull so, so gently, his fingers parting the fine hairs at his nape, while his left remains open and unrestraining on his hip. Their hands sing with juxtaposition and reveal far too much, but now, John supposes, now it is far too late to pretend and fake indifference.

After a few beats - maybe five, maybe five thousand - John opens his mouth and his hands flatten out into the impression of wings at Sherlock’s shoulder blades, no longer gripping but pressing them together, closer and closer until the only air between them is the rush of their breaths and all they can hope to accomplish is to melt into both of their skin, their bones.

They stand, swaying slightly, cushioned and wrapped amongst the wind’s every iced tendril while the entire world continues uselessly, ignorant of an embrace twelve storeys upwards, encased in the clouds.


	21. 1994, December

John imagines the wind would be cool against his skin at this precise moment; that it would batter him down and down and choke him and remind him that he and everyone are still alive, that they all survived this.

This coat of skin he wears is too hot. Blistering. The air against it lies still.

He is leaving an imprint of his palm on the glass so he stops and looks at the sky instead. It’s grey. Camouflaging. His hands move to the window ledge and grip so hard his wrist aches, his knuckles become bleached.

It’s his breath now that taints it - too quick, too quick - condensing on the cold barrier between him and the sky, so he turns his head and focuses on the wallpaper which is perfect and undiscovered and nothing at all like he imagined and everything it should be. Sherlock spent years looking at this wall, he reminds himself. Years where he was alone. Years in which, perhaps, he had touched John, touched the paper, all within the space of an hour.

It hurts that he hasn’t been here before. The roof was their salvation, but it forced them to become estranged from the truth. Maybe now they should make up for lost time, he thinks. Maybe it’s already lost to them.

His breathing is slowing, the wallpaper fading into an ocean of blurred creams and yellows.

The bathroom door opens with a gentle click and soft light floods to John’s feet. It grew darker but he didn’t realise; he only recognises it now with Sherlock’s presence. Everything is calmer, sweeter. Shrouded in a comfortable haze.

Clarity only lead to imperfection, anyway.

Sherlock moves towards him: one, two, three steps. They should echo, sing with definitiveness.

They are silent on the carpet.

He takes him into his arms, holds him for a heartbeat. Sherlock’s scent overwhelms and devours so when they both lean back centimeters, a mere fraction, John - hungry now - closes the distance between them and kisses and kisses and kisses until there is nothing of either of them left. Not even the marrow in their bones, the air in their lungs.

Sherlock removes John’s jacket, tosses it somewhere forgotten. The air is too thick, too transient. Everything is intangible while their mouths remain pressed together.

He pushes him towards the bed and for a moment - a fleeting moment of falling and infinite time - John’s feet are lost to him as he stumbles backwards onto the mattress, but it catches him. This bed here, he hopes, always will.

He lowers himself back gently, his shoulder blades just bruising the pillows. Sherlock smiles tentatively but there is something sharper in his eyes, something hungrier buried beneath the blue.

John starves for it.

To think that now the universe has deemed them so irrelevant that not a single stray thought of any one of the billions of human beings is reserved for their absence; well. It’s liberating.

They are alone in their own solar system, mapped out in the lightest of freckles painted onto Sherlock’s skin, constellations that no longer burn with light but instead with a desire to be touched. These are their stars and right now, right exactly now in this pause, this hesitation, this uncertainty and gasping of breath and admiration, they have an eternity with them.

Sherlock places a firm palm in the small of his back before raising him and pulling his shirt up, off, thrown to the floor. Their air is warm between them but John’s flesh rises and sings as if it’s almost aching, yearning. His body toys with Sherlock’s gravitational forces and those of their planet for a second before his back is arching against the sheets again, struggling with the reality of liquid silk.

It occurs to John now that this is Sherlock’s childhood bedroom, bed. He sullies that purity, somewhat. And yet it’s Sherlock’s current room, too; awash with memories John hasn’t been privy to just yet.

The ceiling is littered with whorls and stardust and the concept that there is another, more significant universe beyond these four walls is suddenly ridiculous. Sherlock utters a noise so delicate it is hardly there at all and John’s trousers and underwear are strewn across the carpet before he fully acknowledges his vulnerability.

“Bit of an inequality here,” He breathes, pointing to his bare skin and Sherlock’s clothed chest.

An eyebrow is cocked but he climbs off John’s haphazard form to strip quickly, perfunctorily. He is completely unselfconscious and John marvels that his presence hasn’t matured into a damning one. Sherlock hesitates slightly, his eyes roaming skin and bed.

The world can wait.

He returns, balancing on his elbows and knees without touching John. Framing him. Caging him. Protecting him from all the forgotten universes waiting restlessly above the roof. Their eyes roam each other’s, losing track of the seconds beating into the walls and drifting skywards, drifting beyond that. Everything is filtered backwards into white noise, dust, fractions of infinite grains of sand and suddenly ineffable blue is the only thing left to them.

John’s wrist worms upwards, his fingertips grazing Sherlock’s back and urging him downwards, urging him towards contact. A gasp shatters through everything when he complies. A chest to a chest. A thigh to a thigh. It’s unfeasible to determine which belongs to whom.

And when John shifts his hips slightly, a broken groan rumbles through Sherlock’s chest, barely reaching his mouth. The sound smothers, destroys; John imagines a tiny piece of himself shattering in this moment, the beauty of consentient annihilation rippling outwards into his every cell.

Sudden, unrestrained need wreaks through him and he reaches his hands, shifts, pulls, molds until his back is pressed against the headboard and Sherlock above him slightly, straddling his thighs. Sherlock’s hands are behind him, gripping into the wood so tight that stark white begins to blossom on every knuckle, their erections barely brushing.

Sherlock’s lips graze his and it’s so gentle he imagines the scent of cherry blossom rather than the human carnalities of physical intimacy. John reaches one hand between them and Sherlock’s mouth pushes forward hungrily, taking and taking.

John marvels. In all of the different universes one of them is dead now; they drifted gently, perhaps violently apart; they made mistakes that broke and broke them further than they have until this moment; John is holding a gun under his arm killing merely in the act of survival and it’s twisted, so twisted perhaps they won’t meet again; the drugs destroyed everything he values completely and wholly so all there is left is sickly yellow and dust; the stars weren’t so kind to them; the cherry blossom didn’t fall that day because it rained so hard the pavements began buckling and all the petals in the entire world drowned silently, begrudgingly. But instead, they’re here. Wrapped in each other despite everything, dreaming of a sky only they can see.

Sherlock alters his angle slightly and - oh - the pressure begins to build in John’s abdomen, becoming tauter and tauter with Sherlock gasping in tandem, his tongue in his mouth.

He looks down, sees the two heads pushing messily together, red and urgently slick. It’s what undoes him. He strokes once, twice more before he comes, whining slightly into sherlock’s mouth, before relaxing back against the headboard, panting.

Sherlock removes one hand and brings it down to his own cock, moving faster than before. The noise is filthy. Lewd. All it can do is incite and build and build.

“You do know that,” He swallows, his breathing ragged, strained. “That you’re very important to- to. No. That- it doesn’t even begin to-” He breaks off, breaks apart with a small noise.

John exhales as Sherlock begins to shudder visibly. He smiles. “Did you remember that there’s a sky above us, right now? That we’re surrounded by the life of everyone we deem significant or insignificant? Because I didn’t. I forgot because there is no one more significant to me than you are, right now, sweating and disgusting and racked with incredible need. I can see it on your face, you need to-- Forget the sky again. Forget the clouds and the birds and all of the galaxies because we are here and I need you, _need you_ to come for me.”

He does.

He collapses onto John’s chest, uncomfortably warm, but they lie together nonetheless. Repugnant and sweaty and sticky and content. Together.

After a short while John tilts his head, watching the wallpaper. It’s seen so much but it reveals little. Another memory collected. No more significant.

So he watches the wallpaper and runs his hand along it, feeling the ridges mold into constellations beneath his fingertips. Their universe. The grey sky outside has slowly melted into black.


	22. 1994, December

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: Christmas  
Date: 20/12/94

I can’t see you before Christmas. I want to but I can’t. My dad’s going nuts, says I have to be with him constantly. You know, preparing. It’s a bit shit.

But yeah, I can’t see you. Speak to you. And I want to desperately. 

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: Christmas  
Date: 20/12/94

You have to meet me, John.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: Christmas  
Date: 20/12/94

It’s not exactly as if I want this! I could probably get away actually on the 25th. Could you?

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: Christmas  
Date: 20/12/94

Definitely not. No. I would be sorely missed by my family. They would be distraught without my jovial presence. I am the favourite son, after all. Christmas would never be the same again.

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: Christmas  
Date: 21/12/94  
Is that an attempt at sarcasm?

 

From: Sherlock Holmes  
To: John Watson  
Subject: RE: Christmas  
Date: 21/12/94

Yes, you idiot. Christmas day, 2pm?

 

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: RE: Christmas  
Date: 21/12/94

You’re such a pillock.

 

For the first time, they meet at the bottom of the stairs. The wind pushes at their backs, urges them skywards as they climb, the backs of their hands barely brushing despite the lack of anyone to hide from here. 

They reach the summit together and although there’s no snow - there couldn’t be, not today - it’s fiercely bitter. 

“I know we haven’t, uh, done this before but I felt that,” Sherlock reaches a hand inside the left pocket of his coat. “Well, maybe the situation just called for it. I don’t know, it doesn’t really even matter, but. Here.”

He pulls out a box. Small. Rectangular. Unobtrusive. And when he hands it over, it fits like a heart in the palm of John’s hand. 

“I realise you don’t wear jewellery, so you don’t have to. I mean. Don’t feel obliged to. And I. Uh.” Sherlock pretends the wind has stolen his words, whipped them into the air and around the sky for so long that they are lost to everything but the stars. 

John’s knuckles are quietly stiff with the cold, but he opens it. 

“You know, it’s part of the anthophila group - which I’ve always found interesting.” Sherlock begins again, perturbed by the silence. “And they have the higher classification of apoidea but this particular representation, I believe, has the binomial name of apoidea Halictidae, although this designer must have taken liberty with artistic license as the actual creatures themselves are much larger in diameter. In retrospect, this maybe wasn’t the most appropriate choice because they’re often nicknamed ‘sweat bees’ as they’re attracted to human perspiration, but they do favour to be most active at dusk or at night - much like you, I fancied - and tend to dole out minor--”

John’s lips press into his, pointedly. Perfunctorily. Sherlock inhales sharply through his nose before reciprocating, his mouth moving softly, tenderly, accepting this gratitude. 

A delicate, gold chain is clenched in John’s fist, from which hangs a small pendant, intricately molded to represent a bee. ‘J.W’ is engraved deftly into one side, ‘S.H’ on the other. It sways slightly, the physical purport of something larger forgotten in this moment. 

When they part with a soft noise, John murmurs against his mouth, “I love it”. The sound rumbles through his chest and all the winds fall silent, still. He opens his mouth again and John falls into it, his tongue chasing Sherlock’s, caressing it.

They stand, mirrored and braced together against the planet turbulently existing below them. John’s fingers breach the hem of Sherlock’s gloves and slowly circle the vulnerable flesh there, hidden. 

“I’m only sorry I never thought to get you anything.” He smiles softly. “I didn’t know you wanted anything, you berk. You should have said.”

“I don’t.” It’s quick. Succinct. 

“Well.” John’s eyes flick almost wistfully to the winter clouds lingering behind Sherlock’s right ear. “You know I wouldn’t mind if you change your decision.”

“I know.”

It only gets colder with time, but as it passes they move to sit on one corner of the lip of the roof, their feet dangling over the edge. John presses his back into Sherlock’s chest and Sherlock nestles his chin onto John’s head and they both marvel silently at how they fit so perfectly and yet so intricately it couldn’t have been mapped out by design. 

“I’ve been wondering,” John begins. “I mean. You’re eighteen, I’m nineteen. Why can’t we just. Just.”

“Eloquent work, John.”

“Alright, shut it. All I’m trying to say is- is why are we still having to sneak out to see each other? Why are we still living under these roofs? I just- I don’t know. A thought. All I’ve ever really wanted to do was get out - get out properly, just escape completely - and here I am, at an age where I could definitely do that but instead I’ve found myself stuck. Rooted. Petrified, I suppose.”

“Or maybe it’s just habit.”

“That’s not- maybe. Maybe. All I’m getting at here is, um. Suppose. Suppose we lived together? Rather than with these people we didn’t really want to live with at all. And, yeah, suppose we lived together, then all of this would be so much easier. Or maybe, maybe we don’t want it to be easier. I don’t know. Maybe easier would make us bland. It’s only- this is all just food for thought. Sorry.

John watches Sherlock swallow.

“Are you asking me to move in with you?”

“No. No, I’m asking you to buy a flat with me.”

“Oh. Right.” The wind drags at his hair, running icy fingers between the curls. “That’s um. It would take commitment.”

“This is too quick, isn’t it. Sorry. I, um. Sorry.” John worries at his lip.

“No, I’m just saying it would take commitment.”

“You don’t think I’m committed.”

“Are you?”

He exhales noisily. “Yes. Yes of course Sherlock, of course I am. How can you not see that? Every cell I have has grown with complete and utter commitment to you embedded into my very DNA. I couldn’t be less committed if I tried.”

His words repeat over and over in silent minds until the words have been washed clean into almost nothing at all.

“Mycroft would hate it.” Sherlock replies at last.

“What?”

“Me, moving away from the house. He’d hate it.” 

Their gazes lock together and their expressions remain stoic for all of four seconds. It’s comfortable now, the conversation postponed and them both thinking silently to the grey mass above them. But they don’t breach the topic again. Not for a long time.

Everything hisses about them until they’re numb to it and all hues blur into a continuous, faded light. Time is immaterial.

“I often think,” Sherlock clears his throat, his voice having grown rugged from merely breathing in the cold. “I often think how different I’d be.”

“Different. In what circumstance?”

“If I hadn’t met you.” His voice resounds through John’s bones. “I think sometimes, I think. Well, that perhaps if I hadn’t been beaten up that day in early August, I wouldn’t be able to do - this - now.” He kisses the shell of John’s right ear. “That if I had cried just a little quieter, they might never have stopped. Not for a long time. That if you had given up on me, dismissed me like- like everyone else did I. I might have snapped, got turned out of the house, be leading a less than savoury existence instead of this. I might be dead.”

No birds now, no birds. Only the empty sky, reaching with firm and enduring hands beyond them, infinitely claiming the horizon.

“You can’t know that, though.” John shifts, allowing their eyes to connect. 

“No.” He exhales, draining tension. “No, I can’t pretend to predict alternate futures for myself but I do know that. Well, I do know I’d be a very different human being if I hadn’t met you. Unpredictable yes, but different.”

For a heartbeat it’s silent, then, “Me too.”

The Christmas festivities of all the lives sunken below the sightline of theirs continue, unbeknownst to the two men - boys, really - wrapped in their own heads and each other, oblivious to the December cold seeping into their bones.


	23. 1995, May

Sherlock’s skin, warm from sleep.

Oceans and oceans of goosebumps rising to greet the late morning sunlight. 

Nothing rushes here; even their blood slinks lazily from tip to tip of their bodies, sustaining yet undetectable. 

John’s arm wound delicately around the dip just below Sherlock’s ribcage, their ankles slotted together, the tops of John’s thighs pressed against the backs of Sherlock’s. He watches the sun kiss poetry against the skin before him until the earth can no longer conjure up any worthwhile vocabulary to describe it. To describe this.

The scent of cotton and humanity overwhelms him, sobers him. Everything soars because this is his to touch now, and it seems they have everlasting time (but they don’t).

A slight shift, a fluttering breath against a neck. Sherlock’s eyes open a mere inch from his own and he smiles sleepily. Part of John longs for him to turn again, to sleep so he can drink in this moment, these last twenty three minutes of the steady rise and fall of life, of mapping out seas between the moles and freckles. But now there’s sharpness and energy back in Sherlock’s gaze and his consciousness; his mind completes him to such an extent that John wishes they both would never sleep again. 

The dust motes are swirling in the light which leaks through the gap in the curtain they forgot to close properly. A symphony of time and the cells of themselves scattered only to create the most perfect of harmonies.

John’s blunt fingertips lightly swirl against Sherlock’s abdomen, the first three of his ribs, the stark shapes of his hipbones. He hears an intake of disjointed and faltering breath so he stops, moves his palm to hold against Sherlock’s chest. He only wanted the taste of touch, nothing more. 

Not in this breath of time.

Sherlock bites his lip. “I. I don’t mind.”

“I know. I know, just- not now. Not right now. Let me just.” John breathes delicately at the nape of Sherlock’s neck, kissing the top of his spine delicately. “Let me just drink you in.”

He settles back against John, muscles relaxing and the birds in his head flying slowly upwards.

The air tastes like the precipice of summer, but not quite.

“I had a dream.” He says at last with John’s eyelashes brushing against his skin. 

“Alright, Martin Luther King.”

“Shut up.” John smiles warmly - his eye’s are only half lidded and the pillow has left a road map indented into his cheek - it’s like the sun. “Last night, I had a dream.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They both breathe.

“It was, uhm, summer. And it was warm, so warm I could feel that sun in the marrow of my bones and it couldn’t have been more perfect except then you were there and it was. We were lying together on some dried grass - it was so hot the grass had all died but it was still green, still luscious to look at - and we lay with that rasping on our skin, staring at the blue eternity above us until forever, I think. I mean, we believe that the average dream lasts around six seconds but I was- I wasn’t dreaming, we were just somewhere else, somewhere different and I think a part of us is still there.”

He swallows audibly, wets his lips. John’s presence is urging him forward, seeping into his bones, settling at the base of him abdomen.

“Can you, ah. Can you remember when we were maybe fourteen, fifteen, I don’t know exactly, and we went to that place on the roof - our roof - but it was winter and so cold that we could hardly stand so we took the sleeping bags - you know, that awful red colour still haunts me sometimes - the sleeping bags we kept stuffed in that corner and it was so cold we just, uh, we just spoke about a place where it wasn’t cold, not in the slightest and we could hear water and birds and feel the dry scrape of the grass on our backs and you said- you said we had a-”

“A dog. I said we had a dog.”

Sherlock leans his head backwards.

“You do remember.”

“Of course I remember, of course I do. It was one of the best moments of that year.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Really, Sherlock. Really. So your dream was, was-?”

Sherlock rolls in John’s arms so he is facing him, their knees and ankles uncomfortably locked together before slinging one arm over his hip.

“Just like it. Just like that day.” He pulls John closer so their hips are pressed together and they both gasp quietly. “We could, uh.” He leans in so their noses are just touching, brushes a stray strand of hair off John’s face. “We could do that, you know.”

“Do what?” John breathes.

“I have a grandmother. She’s French, lives in the south of France. I mean, it’s beautiful in the summer, just like that, like how we said. She’s the only relative I can actually stand and she. She’d be fine, more than fine with this, us.”

“Are you inviting me to spend my summer holiday with you?”

“Well, she’s invited me to go down there this year anyway, and she’ll be jubilant I’ve finally found someone. Even more jubilant that it’s you.”

John raises his eyebrows. “She knows who I am?”

“She’s known who you are for a while. I tell her everything that is most important to me. You, predominantly.”

The last word is mostly eclipsed by the press of John’s mouth, yielding but hot. He traces his tongue across Sherlock’s soft palate, the insides of his lip, and his fingers - once hanging loosely alongside Sherlock’s skin - now grip, holding them fast together. Sherlock clenches his fist in John’s hair, sweeps over the shell of his ear. They part, breathing slowly but hard.

“Your breath is absolutely vile.” John kisses him again, teeth dragging slightly on his lip before letting him go. “Disgusting, you’re disgusting.”

Sherlock’s mouth is red, swollen, wet. His hair makes no sense and he grins. “I know.”

John kisses the side of his mouth, his jaw, the underside of his chin, leaving sloppy and indelicate trails across his face. “God,” He kisses the bone above Sherlock’s left eye, his cupid’s bow. “God, how I love you.”

They both stop, freeze. A million a particles of dust forget they were dancing. Sherlock blinks once, twice, three times in quick succession and his mouth parts with an unobtrusive click. 

“You um.” He swallows. Starts again. “You. I mean. Right. Right, okay.” A shaken laugh flutters out from between his lips and he smiles. “Really?”

John’s eyes crinkle at their corners and his heart remembers survival. “Really.”

Sherlock breathes out, “Oh,” and he looks so delicate, so vulnerable and completely breakable in this moment that it could shatter the very cells in John’s blood.

And then they’re kissing, messy and so desperate to climb into each other’s skin that it’s more like a war than an embrace. A high pitched noise worms its way out of Sherlock’s throat as John worms a hand between Sherlock’s legs. They’re writhing and sloppy; knees bash painfully against knees, Sherlock is pulling far too hard on John’s scalp and John’s knuckles knock so hard against Sherlock’s abdomen in the small space between their bodies he can feel it bruise but it’s okay, it’s okay because they’re here and real and living and together. Every breath, every heartbeat is heightened in this moment.

It’s not the lazy morning sex John had envisioned but when it’s over and there’s come growing sticky between their bodies, it doesn’t really matter. Their sweat cools on their skin and they lie entangled, breathing against each other’s mouths for what could have been minutes, could have been decades. 

“Thank you,” Sherlock mumbles at last and John doesn’t say anything because he’s swallowing too slowly and sleep is inching closer behind his eyes, but he smiles gently.

The sunlight prevails and they drift, lost to all of the universes except the black holes of the other’s eyes.


	24. 1995, July

The world, mapped out and so ignorant, so basic 37,000 feet below their bodies. Everything is simplified. Distorted. They’re above so many other lives and it humbles them.

John watches the white fingers brush almost hesitantly past the glass on his left, the only memory of it being the condensation trailing like forgotten meteorites. Slowly, slowly; the sky breathes for them.

Quiet voices shift around the air pressure and it’s horrible - so horrible his stomach plummets as they ascend so fast it hurts, it hurts - but bearable only by the thought of their destination. this hand in his - as now - and their moments under bluer skies and warmer colours preserved like polaroids, only with little exposure but more than their original intention could ever express. 

The sky always seems so much closer when you’re not buried within it. 

He closes his eyes and all he can feel are the slightly callused fingers of a violin player encased between his own, or the slight hum of the aircraft which gives everything an almost surreal edge and makes his blood sing. 

It wakes him up, gives him life. It’s terrifying. 

The air is whispering the word ‘soon’ over and over, and for some reason this entire escapade seems like a goodbye, a grand and elaborate adieu. This can’t work, it won’t work. The future looks too perfect. Too perfect and too dangerous. The sky is still singing and his teeth feel too heavy.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. In moments it sounds sincere, in others, repulsively taunting. 

Perhaps it’s meant as a farewell to their own country. Or instead, an end to their beginning. John doubts it. The air inside his lungs is becoming rancid but he can’t quite seem to be able to repel it from his chest. All he wants are the shadows to engulf him, rather than this recycled oxygen ebbing and flowing into his alveoli. It’s like, he considers, the tide.

The air is stale in the cabin and the muffled roar of the plane beneath their feet won’t let John forget how unnatural their position is. They are bugs, straining to touch an invisible god. The space between their chests is far too small, too much of a vast expanse. Everything aches.

From this height, the ocean looks like harmless, almost inviting water; a gently rolling mass of blue. It appears shallow. John could fall and fall for an eternity, always drowning but never succumbing to the cold and the dark. The deception of their entire planet burns. 

“I need to kiss you.” John’s voice is quiet, blurring into the drone of the aircraft. No one notices he has spoken. 

Sherlock’s head snaps towards him, his eyelids blinking repetitively. It’s like a fast shutter lense, preserving every single millisecond in paper and ink. “What?”

“I said I need to- I need to-” He kisses him, lurching awkwardly over the separating armrest. The stewardess is busy in isle thirty seven. Nobody sees them. They are invisible, lost amongst a forest of poorly-upholstered aeroplane seats.

“John?” Another clumsily aimed kiss. “John, you’re panicking.” But that mouth, that mouth. Sherlock allows himself to be drawn closer by John’s lips for only a moment before breaking away again in resilience. “John, come on. Remember to breathe. Look at me. Look at me.”

John looks at him. His breath hitches, lodged in the forgotten recesses of his throat. His eyes flick against the encroaching darkness.

“You’ve never been on an aeroplane before.”

“No.” His breathing is stunted, as if he has forgotten the skill entirely.

Sherlock’s eyebrows furrow. “Well of course you haven’t. How stupid of me. How--”

A pause. The ocean is still turbulently mocking them. The ignorant plane blunders on.

“The odds are eleven million to one that you’ll die in a plane crash. Comparably, it’s only five thousand to one that you’ll die in a car crash. You’re fine in cars. You’re fine here. It’s okay, look out of the window. You’re not going to die in this plane.”

John’s eyes flutter shut for two heartbeats. “You idiot. I’m not scared that I’ll die in a plane crash. I’m scared that I’ll die in a plane crash with you.”

“What?”

“I’m scared that you’ll die in a plane crash and I won’t. I’m scared that we’ll both die. I’m scared that we’ll both survive. We, both of us, well-- We’re barely islands apart. So together we’re- we’re the ocean but smaller, with the same amount of waves. Do you understand?”

Sherlock takes a sip of the sprite that sits untouched between them. The aeroplane trays look slightly forlorn in their emptiness. He returns the plastic cup and purses his lips. “Not really.”

“Never mind, then. It’s the sea, it’s the-- Once we’re over France it won’t matter. I won’t be able to see the ocean anymore. I can pretend it’s not there.”

They both sit and contemplate in the roaring silence how nothing particularly would matter once they are over - in - France, dry grass and sunlight tickling their skin. They contemplate each other, down there, with their insignificant lives so tiny and irrelevant, and how beautifully lost they could allow themselves to become.


	25. 1995, July

Sherlock breathes in the scent of warm temperatures, water-starved plants.

“It’s summer, John.”

“Yes. It is. It is rather.” A smile threatens to break out across his face.

“We’re in france, John. We made it.”

Two pairs of eyes turn skywards, searching for something they don’t expect to find amongst the blue.

Every bone of Sherlock’s has been warmed by the sun, as if the light has seeped amongst all the marrow and made comforting home there. He - they both - are content to lie under this sky forever. Dry grasses rasp lazily against the skin on their backs and they’re both drunk on the simplistic perfection of the moment.

There’s not a car park in sight.

Across from them are fields upon fields, cracked mud and dry barley. Sherlock knows exactly how the earth from them feels caked between his toes, how the air tastes. They hear a bird somewhere to their left and it sings in tandem with their minds.

“Can you remember, John?” Sherlock’s voice breaks absolutely nothing at all.

“Remember what?”

“We dreamt this once. Together.” Sherlock inhales, drinking the summer into his lungs.

“I know, you sod. You keep reminding me.”

He turns his head lazily to face John, the grass prickling at his ear now, the side of his face. “I suppose, then, that I keep thinking - wondering - if every dream like this we permit ourselves to have will mould eventually into fruition. And if they if they do, I wonder if they could ever turn out to be as perfect as this.”

John reaches, bends, gently kisses the pads of Sherlock’s fingertips. “I think, to answer you, that this can only be a fluke. I can’t get so lucky all of the time. I mean, this is pretty much the epitome of perfect.”

Sherlock smiles warmly, slowly. “It wouldn’t be worth it without you.”

“Nor without you.”

“Now I- now I come to think of it, we could be anywhere right now. Anywhere at all. The Arctic. Africa. A Norwegian glacier. The one element that makes it so desirable is that there’s no one here- there’s no one. Except us. You, me. There’s no one.”

“Your grandmother, too, Sherlock.”

“She’s as deaf as a- a- terribly deaf thing. It’s as if she’s not here. My point is, we’re free here. Liberated. We can be who we like and do what we like and no one we know will care.”

John pushes an elbow underneath him, leaning forwards, forwards. He whispers at Sherlock’s mouth, “For example-” and promptly kisses him.

The heat of John’s mouth and the heat of the sky all blends into one colour, and the slow stroke of tongues in the wet stirs something at the base of Sherlock’s spine.

John pulls back, grinning, wiping his mouth. “No, no, it’s far too hot for anything like that.”

A groan emerges from between Sherlock’s lips, and he slumps back against the ground. “Rude.”

They lie for a while, splayed out somewhere transient between earth and sky, their fingertips barely brushing. It’s silent, but it’s a comfortable silence; warm and pierced occasionally by the shrill, jovial call of a starling.

Their minds no longer inhabit their heads, their thoughts as fickle as the tide.

Sherlock’s voice, lazy and somewhat hoarse interrupts the oceans of sky turbulently filling their skulls. “Do you remember- I told you once- well I said. I said. It was down the telephone and I recited some Cummings. It must have been last year, it must have been last year because I hate using the phone.”

“I remember. My sun, my moon and all my stars. I do remember. I wrote it down.”

Sherlock smiles. “I didn’t think you would. Well, anyway I- I said afterwards that there was more that I wanted to- I wanted to say. So you asked me to say it but I said, I think I said that there are some things that can’t be said from voice to mere voice. I panicked, I got scared. I never said what I meant to. In the end. It never seemed right.”

“But it seems right now?” John bites his lip, feels dry grass worry at his dry feet.

“I think so.” He inhales, exhales, inhales, in, in, in. His words are mumbled, barely audible. Buried close to the protection of his ribcage. “ _Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond/ any experience, your eyes have their silence:/ in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,/ or which I cannot touch because they are too near._ ”

“Oh.” A breath. An exhale.

Sherlock’s voice rises, flowers keep pouring out of his mouth and his nose and he can’t- he can’t stop them. His eyes remain fixed on the sky hours and hours above him. “ _Your slightest look easily will unclose me/ though I have closed myself as fingers,/ you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens/ (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose._ ”

He rises now, one elbow propped under him, his torso twisted away from the light, towards John. The flowers don’t stop. “ _Or if your wish be to close me, I and/ my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,/ as when the heart of this flower imagines/ the snow carefully everywhere descending;/ nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals/ the power of your intense fragility: whose texture/ compels me with the colour of its countries,/ rendering death and forever with each breathing._ ”

Sherlock’s eyes meet John’s and he thinks he could be lost in the sheer foreverness of them. His voice becomes as quiet as the clouds but as powerful as a silent avalanche, always growing, always growing. “ _(I do not know what it is about you that closes/ and opens; only something in me understands/ the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)/ nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands._ ”

John’s hand reaches, brushes Sherlock’s mouth. “I never knew, I didn’t-- you.”

A pause.

“Why you?” Sherlock breathes.

“I ask this. I ask myself this on a daily basis. Why me- why did you choose me, I-- I don’t think we’ll ever really find out.”

Sherlock’s mouth quirks. He slumps back against the ground, one palm resting on the planes of John’s chest. “I’m actually fine with that.”

They drift on beams of endless sunlight, lost to the song of the crickets and the oceans of air.

After a while, John’s mouth opens. Shuts. Stutters on nothing.

“Say it, John.”

“What should I say?”

“Whatever you want to say. You want to say something.”

John licks his upper lip. “It’s just - I suppose - that I’m worried about you.”

He raises a singular eyebrow. “Worried?”

“Yeah. Why aren’t you at university, Sherlock?”

“Why aren’t you?”

He laughs dryly. “At least I have a job!”

“At least I have money. It could be yours too if- if-” A sharp inhale, a barrier of air. “What I mean to say is, I- I’d quite like to live with you here one day. Just with you. And this forever sun. A dog, we always said we’d get a dog.”

“It wouldn’t work. We couldn’t do it.”

“We could try.”

Words said and words not filter through their tongues and settle in their lungs between them. After a while it grows darker, trees began to rustle in the dusk. They stand, stretch, retreat to the stone cottage, John’s arm slung around Sherlock’s bare hip.


	26. 1996, April

The summer feels like a decade ago. The next one feels so near John can taste the warmth on the seconds on his wristwatch. He climbs and it’s burningly familiar. 

Worn rubber on cheap concrete.

The metallic scent of the palms of his hands after gripping the handrail, exhausted and paleing paint. 

When he reaches the concluding level, sees the figure so dark and proud, buffeted by the wind and the sky and then nonexistent, once-rain, he feels the air allows him the liberty of breathing again. 

And yet there is something- something drawn about the figure. A decrease in the radiation of the all-consuming Sherlock Holmes. 

He approaches, worn rubber on cheap concreate, silent step, silent steps. 

“Sherlock.” The figure doesn’t move, his eyes fixed on the useless sky above them, the tarmac of unacheivable possibilities below them. Maybe once, maybe once. 

“John.”

Sherlock turns, greets him, just barely brushes his lips across the underside of John’s right eye, places a gloved hand on his coat-padded hip. His mouth is cold. 

It’s a greeting, a usual greeting.

It just doesn’t feel quite as heartfelt as usual, and John can’t really string the words inside his head to define why.

Sherlock opens his mouth. His eyes are focused on the ground behind John’s head, perhaps tracing the outline of worn down stone, worn away, worn away. It was worn before they arrived. “I uh. I’ve got a job.”

“Good.” He waits a beat. Two. Flicks his eyes to Sherlock’s. They won’t meet his. “That’s good, that’s good, isn’t it? A job?”

Sherlock licks his lips. Maybe he believes himself to have said something, although any sentences he thinks are lost to the pastel grey of the horizon. 

“Are you going to- to tell me?”

Muscles twitch, his eyebrows furrow.

“Tell you what?”

John’s hands rest on Sherlock’s ribs, a placating hold. It’s like a second rib cage, a cruel and tantalising thing. Sherlock knows it won’t be able to contain him forever.

“Your job. What your job is.”

“Oh. It’s uh. Um. A job where. Well, you see. A job. I haven’t really got any-- What I mean is that I- I have to do- to do it.”

“Right.”

“It’s a, um.” His jaw twitches to the right. “Mycroft has given me it.”

The wind beats a song with the dead leaves, and the sibilance of the thing tells the pigeons of the danger. 

“That’s. That’s kind of him?” A question Sherlock chooses not to answer.

“Well. Isn’t it funny? That we keep coming up here- we keep coming up here although we don’t really have to anymore. It’s a habit, a tradition. We’re just sort of clinging on to being thirteen and slightly awkward and cold and so horrifically ignorant that we- we just had no idea and- and- and this is us now, trying to be that again when we don’t really have to, when it’s better now. Or at least, we think it’s better now. I read somewhere that once someone said ‘tradition’ is one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking. And I think- I think.”

The sun breaks the cloud barrier. The heat of it doesn’t reach John’s bones. 

“So,” Sherlock clears his throat, squints against the new light. “So this job. I, ah, don’t really have a choice in the matter. Mycroft says I have to redeem myself. He’ll cancel my passport, any documents of importance. He’ll put the drug history back on my record. He’ll tell mother to cut me out of her will, and she’ll do it. He’ll um. He’s um. He’s threatening to. Well, I don’t know exactly but he- he threatened you. You, John. He’s a very powerful man.”

“Right. Okay. Well I wouldn’t- I wouldn’t mind, per se. If he followed through on any of that. I can protect myself. Protect you, Sherlock. I wouldn’t mind.”

“I mind.” Sherlock’s head tilts to the left. “Sorry. It’s a- it’s a position in a research facility. I can’t even tell you where it is. Mycroft is- we’ll he’s- it’s finding a biological weapon. It’s a finding a biological cure. I keep being told different things. I’m not allowed um. I’m not allowed- not allowed contact. It’s for three years. I don’t get leave. I’m told the tea is terrible.”

John swallows. “I. I’ll wait, you must understand I’ll wait.”

“It won’t work.”

“This isn’t you, Sherlock, listen to yourself. You said we’d- you said you wanted us to be- to be. You told me once you’d be my constant and I could be your constant in return. I. Oh. He’s holding this over you. One of the conditions- you have to break it off with me, you have to break-- I know he never liked me, but. Oh.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you. But. Yes. He doesn’t like another human being having influence over me alongside him. It’s pathetic, really.” Sherlock smiles apologetically, hollowly. “I have to go, John. I do have to go.”

John steps back, nods once, twice. “So. So you’re ending this. Us.”

Sherlock grimaces, bows his head.

“Last tuesday when you-- I never thought it would be the last time I- I. When do you go?”

“Next week. I go next week.”

John inhales. He’s scared his chest will break quite cleanly, quite extraordinarily in two. “I have to. Um.” He motions over his left shoulder. 

“Yes.”

He doesn’t think Sherlock is breathing at all. 

John allows himself a final glance, sees the stoic shape pointed towards the skyline again, motionless except for the wind tangled between his curls. 

He doesn’t know whether to leave with a kiss or a handshake.

He does neither. 

Worn rubber on cheap concrete. It’s the same- it’s the same as ever. Nothing has ever changed here, not for all nine years of their temporary presence. They were only visitors, and so nothing has changed. Nothing will, nothing will. They just won’t be around to see the nothing years happen, but they’ll happen nonetheless.


	27. 1996, May

The plane turns, rolls away from the small car on the runway. Faster, faster, gliding into the air like a familial embrace, like ballet. The sky seems to hold it like one might try to hold a song.

John watches it leave. It seems small. Oddly insignificant.

Maybe his body stood helplessly next to the car looks insignificant from the air. Maybe there’s no one looking to even think of him as being insignificant in this moment. Maybe there’s no one looking at all. 

In his mouth is bitterness but his chest contains only echoes of painful regret, or perhaps passivity. This is out of his hands.

Nothing happens. Nothing of interest, of particular note. One straight line from the thin strip of tarmac to the home of all of every god. It’s as if the sky isn’t aware of what precious cargo it holds in its hands. John hopes it’s gentle. Hopes it’s respectful. He isn’t allowed to be anymore, he has no right to be. 

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. He remembers the sky singing over the English Channel. It’s not calling anymore, but his throat remembers the exact resonance of the words. He should have known it then, should have seen it coming, should have prevented it. 

Maybe he should never have rounded that corner when he was twelve. Maybe he should never have-- No. Don’t wish against happenings. Especially those which have changed him, moulded him so completely. He wonders who he would be without the contents of that plane. Someone better, perhaps. Someone less durable. Someone less breakable. Someone less dependant.

It’s growing smaller. He’s becoming more useless. Goodbye. 

He never said it, never said the word. He wonders if he should have done. No. That’s too definite.

Goodbye.

White and blue fades and crescendos together. John isn’t visible. The sky has swallowed the little plane, swallowed it whole. 

Good-

(the clouds are only water vapour, they’re nothing, nothing at all, you couldn’t stand on one but you can’t see, you can’t ever see through them; this sky is so empty, so vast, but it disappears, it disappears, everything always disappears)

-bye.

In all of four seconds, life suddenly stagnates. It’s funny really, how quickly things can rot. Become off, sour.

John turns, sees the man in the suit behind him slightly. Umbrella in hand. He’s even harder to read than his brother.

“John-”

“No.” He turns on his heel, turns his back on the sky. It’s always the same sky - always - but it’s always so different.

“We can drive you to-”

“I’ll walk.”

He walks. 

It’s May and the sun is still revealingly bright but through it all it begins to rain. The sunlight - their last sunlight - is trapped in every raindrop, glistening and romanticising the pavement. John ignores it.

It’s light but soaking. He walks for a while, imagining his thoughts and his own type of light can fend off the water but he remembers that he doesn’t really have any, after a time.

He turns to the road, waves at the black cabs. Four ignore him. The fifth doesn’t. 

He listens to the pointless drone of the radio, the water purging the car. He imagines every raindrop on the windows holds a word that he never got chance to say, a thought he was saving for later. They cling to the glass, shaking and stuttering. They vanish, lost to everyone but the ocean and the road below his feet. Every drop is a brick shattered on his chest.

John thinks of the milk in the fridge, gone off but neglected. He thinks of his sheets, freshly laundered. He thinks of how few photographs of Sherlock he owns, how he doesn’t have his handwriting preserved on anything, anything at all. He thinks of the sky and the rain and the rolling of the sea, and he thinks of how he can’t be stopped now, how a military physician doesn’t sound like such a terrible idea with no one in particular to stay alive for.

He imagines what being shot feels like. He imagines it feels nothing like this.

The rain is slowly drowning the sun, she can no longer breathe but she perseveres, fading, fading into unnatural light.

The plane is still somewhere above John’s head and he wonders if its passengers can hear her choking, can see her dying eyes because she is now- she is dying and there’s nothing anyone can do to save her, nothing at all except to fast forward all the clocks in all of the world. 

The taxi pulls up in descending speed, brakes crying out slightly and muffled between the raindrops. The red of the traffic light makes the water on the glass burn like transience itself. He turns away, bored by the entire charade.

To his left he watches a car in the other lane, two children squabbling silently. They look happy. He doesn’t like to look; it feels like an intrusion of something he once nearly had. Didn’t.

To his right, he watches three men working for the council tear down a tree. They hack at it methodically, efficiently. Like it doesn’t matter. Like it’s time for it to fall. As the light turns green and the cab surges forward beneath him, one of the branches plummets, hurtles towards the ground. 

It’s a sorry thing, damp and sponge-like from the rain. Dead. Now dead.

The traffic hurtles through again and his thoughts are washed over and over by images of shining metal work and the tobacco-ladened scent of the driver. Drowning, drowning, the sun was cleansed by the rain. 

But later, much later, his hair leaving a wet halo in the material of his pillow, his eyes fixed on the amorphous patterns in his ceiling, he thinks of it. The tree. He thinks of the plane and the water and the dying sun and the man with the umbrella who stood like a proud man, who reflected paled apology through the sincerity of his eyes. And he thinks of the tree.

He thinks - he doesn’t know - but he thinks the petals were pink.


	28. 1996, June

From: John Watson  
To: Sherlock Holmes  
Subject: ---  
Date: 03/06/96

i thought, maybe, i thought when you left that you didn’t mean it, not really. that you’d return, maybe write me a letter, a phone call, tell me that he’d let you come back into my open arms - the place where you’re really needed - with a slap on the wrist. a harsh word. we

well

i’ll delete this i think. maybe i’ll save it. read it. delete it someday, when i’ll dredge it up, long forgotten. i’ll read it and then i’ll bin it because then - not now, but then - it won’t even matter. that’s qiite a nice thought, actually.

i’m not even that drunk, really. i found at the back of dad’s old cupboard. cheap whiskey. reminded me of you. illicit alcohol and fags when we were fifteen. we were quite stupid, back then. or maybe i’m looking at it wrong. maybe we were the most intelligent we ever allowed oursekves to be. sometimes i wonder if you’re alright., sometimes i forget about you altogether. 

you said well, he saiud he said 3 years. will you look for me? will you come to try to find me buried somewhjere on the planet where you aren’t yet? yet. you might be. because if you dont try to find me, i’ll go and look for you. i won’t forget. or maybe neither of us will bother. maybe we’ll preted not to notice the years dripping and dripping away from us so we can just. progress. unhindered. 

part of me thinks that would be quite nice.

how accidental was it, do you think? how accidental were we? did you plan it? maybe i planned it. maybe it was the pigeons, conspiring against us, for us. 

oh sherlock,

take me back to france with you

we weren’t designed for this. i don’t know know if our bodies can withstand this. it’s like we’re being ripped cell from cell. maybe you can’t feel itm, i don’t know. i definitely can. 

it’s like an aeroplane it’s like, like we shouldn’t really be able to be there, be so high, it seems so impossible and the pressure hurts and any number of things could go wrong which would mean we would plummet downwards but they don’t. so we remain, hanging in this kind of not-really-space andit’s cruel but we’re hanging on anyway, even if we weren’t tied up here we’re hanging on so tight my knuckles have bleached themselves because even though the sea looks so maliciously inviting we’re not ready to succumb to the waters quite yet. we;re hoping for, hoping for i don’t know

i’m clinging on to you and i don’t know why

it’s almost like you wanted to go, in the end. was i the penultimate poison, the catalyst to to

well i know really, honestly, you wouldn’t have wanted to go. or maybe you were screaming silence.

i know you best out of anyone, anyone. and i’m starting to wonder if i even knew you at all.

i can say it as much as i like, i can, can just

I Knew You

Sherlock Holmes

it doesn;t make it any more right it doesn’t make us any more present, does it

i think i’m angry. i think this is anger but it’s not directed towards you i promise i could never feel. that,. but it’s just anger at the circumstance. not at your brother. not at- i pity him. you must have been so difficult for him to

if you don’t give up on me i won’t give up on you

maybe you should. i’m really very ignorant.

it feels like the sky should be different. it feels like you should take the colour of it with you, because it’s only there for you. but it hasn’t and it isn;t . of course

maybe you’re happier now. maybe you thought you were happy with me but then the world opened up her grasp and you feel into light and shapes so much more vibrant than this, where i stand

i suppose it was the right circumstance, in the end. we weren’t a forever unit so so i suppose when we weren’t anymore, much later, itr would have been much harder because the bonds would be more secure (although i cabn’t imagine them being any more secure than this, than us now, but they would have got stronger than we) and it would have been more damaging, tore off our skin. i can’t picture us growing old together anyway. we wouldn’t really have worked, would we? the pigeons knew all along, the sods.

or

were they being kind were they

we were a force. a train of sorts. colossal and broken but fixing all of the time we were always fixing.

so tell me. tell me on the wind or maybe the rain as you catch them and send them to me acropss thousands of different skies which actually are all the same one except we’re too small and blind to see that. tell me that you’ll come back. tell me that you won’t come back. tell me what you’re seeing, right now. what you’re hearing, send me some air that you’re breathing as a souvenir for me. 

grab my hand - it’s here, it will always, always has been here if only you could open your eyes when the lids are bolted shut, then you’d see - and just jump headfirst into the rain and tell me if it doesn’t work. or don’t because i’ll know because you’ll be here on the left side of my body if it did. 

have you sent an email like this

a non-message

not really saying anything in particular

not sent

not re-read

not exactly coherent because what am i anyway

i don’t think you have. i think you;re too composed, even to yourself. people always assume that you don’t care, that you’re devoid of feeling,m that you choose not to feel, that you can’t feel that you;re broken and strange but fixable. fixable all the same. but i never wanted to fix you, not even the light, faint scratches of imperfections because i could always see that you do. you do feel. and i think it’s your eyes, but they tend to say more than your mouth or your body language half the time and i don’t quite believe you were aware they let that much out. god sherlock your eyes spoke essays from your heart and you didn;t even know, but i did. i could translate you. and that doesn’t make me special or particularly intelligent or wise or different from anybody else it’s just just that i was the only one who bothered to look that hard enough.

it’s funny because sometimes all i can think about is the way your hair was flattened on one side when you woke up or sleeping bags in the rain or the taste of your mouth or wet tyres on wet concrete and water that wasn’t even there at all. it rained afterwards, after that memory but in my mind it was raining when the plane glided gently into impossibility

it’s not, i know it’s not, but in my mind it still is. it still is raining.

 

[Draft saved: 03/06/96]

 

[Draft deleted: 15/08/98]


	29. 2010, January

It’s winter and it looks like it’s spring but the jacket sits heavily on his shoulders. Green grass, green grass. It always is. 

Step, tap, step, tap, step, tap.

John’s hair is immaculate. His shoulders squared, stiff against the battlefield of Regent’s Park. He doesn’t exactly know why he bothers but it’s ingrained now, after so many years. Just like sheet corners pulled stiff and precise, phrases falling off the tongue like old boots. 

Step, tap, step, tap, step, tap, step, tap, step, tap.

It makes an ugly noise. he wears it like a medal. he wears it like an interdict, an anathema. he wears it like he doesn’t know it’s there at all. he’s such an excellent liar that sometimes he believes himself. 

Step, tap, step, tap. 

It’s not like it hurts, anyway.

Step, tap, step, tap, step, tap, ste-

“John!”

It’s not directed at him, it won’t be him. It’s a common name and a voice neither sand-worn nor softly echoed. Padded almost. It’s not for him. Chin down, eyes forward, beat out this daily rhythm on an old, worn drum. Keep pace, don’t forget to keep pace. 

“John Watson!”

Oh. Oh? No. He turns, almost reluctantly. Someone from before, someone from when things didn’t matter as much as they do now, when they mattered so much more. The face has aged, fattened. John’s cane hangs limply by his side, perhaps forlornly. He doesn’t need this now. Or maybe it’s exactly what he needs. Whatever it is, he longs for something more yellow, more transient. He turns his shoulders away, towards the tarmac, the green, green-- the road. Beyond the gates (beyond his skin) everything moves so fast, so hurriedly, yet within himself it is stark bare and monotonous. 

“Stamford.” Of course it is. Of course. “Mike Stamford. We were at Bart’s together.”

His cane wavers slightly, his fist clenches around the handle as if it’s a gun. It is a gun to him. Now, anyway. You never can remove the image of red sand falling away from you in the shower, down and down, stained grit stubbornly remaining under your stubby fingernails. Flesh and blood, it’s what you are, what he is. He clenches harder and the plastic grinds against the bones of his hand. 

They sit. It’s not cold enough to pretend to be hurried, but all the blue has been padded, furtively hidden away beneath the cloud. John imagines that if he could see the sky, hear the individual timbre of London’s breathing then he would finally be immersed in something other than his equivalent of slowly cooling bath water, stale and dead. This isn’t a suicide; it’s an acceptance, a slow petering out until there’s nothing but hollowness and empty space left. A whimper of a goodbye to a once-existence.

Time blurs together, punctuated only by the burn of hot coffee left too long astride his palm. It’s like touching sun-hot metal. Mundane, this is all so mundane. Even a fluctuation, a break in these well-trodden rituals that transport him from one hour to the next, one minute onwards, onwards-- even this stutter of abnormality is so horribly mundane. 

John’s scared that if he closes his eyes he’ll be left with the image of dying lichen petering away across the bark of a tree scarred onto his retinas, or an ant wandering aimlessly in circles, faster and faster, or peeling green paint, or his own shoes splayed before him like the feet of a Dull Man, like the feet of the man sitting beside him that he once knew, like the feet of a civilian. The leather is barely worn. He crosses his ankles beneath the bench, sips at the coffee. It burns his tongue. He takes another sip.

He inhales too loudly and he thinks he interrupts the rumbling monologue but it doesn’t particularly matter. Everything seems too close, too hemming. There’s nothing but grey in his lungs so the air can’t get in. But of course, there was never any air reserved for him here, anyway.

Was there ever a time before this- this. Yes.

Yes, of course there was. Back then, there never was any green to speak of. The green, green- this green. It’s replaced all the grey there used to be; the green flooded out of his chest and into the air sometime, perhaps in the rain. Breathe in, breathe in. He can’t quite seem to.

And then, through the fog-

“...flatmate.”

He’s lonely, he’ll admit. And financially it would save him but he’s not quite sure if he’s ready to cohabit, not quite sure if he’s ready to wake up someone other than himself when all he can see and taste is sand.

“Sorry?”

“I said, you should get yourself a flatmate.”

John contemplates it. The company, the tea, long, long hours, the drawers never being shut, suffocating closeness and worn carpets. It might save him. It might kill him. He’ll humour him. It’s an exciting off-beat, another memory, he’ll buy the milk at six instead of four, wallow in a break of the tedium. 

“Come on, who’d want me for a flatmate?”

It’s whiling away another afternoon. It’s as much adventure as can be made without the heat and a gun tucked into his shoulder, so-- standing, he throws the disposable cup away. Cheap coffee. At least it burned. 

He’s learnt it’s more liberating to be spontaneous, anyway.

But then-- The smell of disinfecting alcohol, polished floors stretching and stretching, corridors of the dying, leaflets, white, clean, smooth, endless, endless; it’s all too familiar. Once, John thinks, once this was his domain, his secret pocket of salvation. Somewhere he could forget himself, apply yet another facade, be a student, be allowed to make mistakes, save the sick. In retrospect, it never really was a selfless job. He was only saving himself, or at least for a short time, blinding himself to all of his own ailments. 

Oh, the memories here. They sound like rubber on clean flooring, feel dry and controlled, taste like cleansed, stuffy air. They’re blurring too fast, molding into one indescribable, volatile shape. Perhaps, perhaps this is like dying, the flashing images that aren’t really images on a Victorian zoetrope, around and around, they’re repeating but because it creates movement rather colour he doesn’t notice, he’ll never notice, he thinks he can taste blood and he’s not even sure if it’s his own.

Then they slow and their footsteps cease but the echoes continue in his mind and Stamford slides some plastic into a door - John hears the minute click, he hears the breach, so fine-tuned to vulnerability that he is - and then there’s a chubby hand on the plastic and it’s swinging it open and he shouldn’t be here, he should be at home, he should be buying milk, he should be writing his blog, he should be opening one old drawer and clicking off the safety and putting the cold, unforgiving mouth into his mouth and waiting, waiting, listening to the clock because it’s all he’s good for now, because that is routine and it’s his safety, his ignorance that he draws like rough hessian over his eyes; the coffee inspired him, it inspired him and he was stupid to leap blindly into- into this.

He always waits for the clock to catch up with his heartbeat but what if it doesn’t, what if it never does, never has done, and one day he realises and doesn’t ever take it out and just twitches one muscle - just one - until his brain is filled with harshness and slight traces of powder burns and that’s okay because at least the moon won’t have seen him. Would anyone even know?

He squeezes - tightly - and the plastic handle grinds into the bones of his hand again, grinds and grounds him. The door is pushed open and the blurred edges fade into clarity and his breathing is more quiet than he thought it was in this empty corridor. Just an empty corridor. Mundane, after all.

There’s a figure sitting at the far end on a bench, head bowed. The back of his skull is hauntingly familiar, achingly so. It mocks him, crushes something buried deep within his gut. Errant, dark curls spur memories - earlier memories - to rush to the forefront of his mind, to sit like an unwanted weight on his tongue, forcing the resurface of so many things that John had forced down, away for so damn long. 

“Ah. Just who I’m looking for.” Stamford’s sweaty face flicks between the two, the two who are still so unaware. Only the stars can watch them now, and they’re all laughing. 

Sherlock Holmes turns minutely on his stool, and his eyes flick over the broken man with the broken cane. His fingers still and his lips part gently, so, so softly, but John is certain he can hear the faint noise of surprise from across all these miles of abandoned benches.

It’s a haunting image. Pale face, almost-black outline, frozen completely, wholly, all except for the irregular bobbing of his throat. John thinks it’s as if he is choking on a hailstorm of words and questions and actions that can’t quite escape the gaping cavity of his chest, that don’t quite make it to the effector muscles that should be twitching and stuttering but have slowly been fossilised into minerals, into rock.

Mike clears his throat, his eyes flicking nervously. John’s certain the entire hospital can taste this ozone. “Well. This is John-”

“Watson. John Watson.” Sherlock turns, meets John’s eyes for the first time in fourteen years and all of the atoms in every universe sing with sudden and jovial alignment, they do, they're both certain they do. 

The white, sterile room is theirs, completely theirs. For once the minutes, the decades have been kind and sucked them completely into a vacuum, so completely they’re alone and the only cells are those of their minds, of their eyes. So yes, they are alone but complete, drifting on memories and light and sudden, inescapable starvation. 

Someone clears their throat for a second time and John notices that the minute hand hasn’t frozen, that the silence is filled with words and lyrics and - perhaps - stray lines of long-forgotten poetry that only they can translate. He shifts, the base of his cane just hovering above the surface of the flooring and he doesn’t even notice that he’s standing on his own two feet. 

“You, uh, you know each other then?”

An indeterminate muscle twitches at the base of John’s rib cage, uncertainty overridden by the sound of his own heartbeat. Somewhere, some dust covered strings at the corners of his mouth are yanked skywards and it’s all he can do to stop himself breathing but some muscles on his face twitch uncomfortably, brilliantly, all the same. 

“Yes,” he smiles now, and he sees Sherlock mirror his light in his peripheral vision. “Yes, something like that.”

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is it, I suppose. Thanks for sticking with me while I've plodded through with this. :) I really didn't know how to finish here, but I got bullied into making it a happy(ish) ending. 
> 
> I'm going to mention that I did so, so much research regarding John's time in the forces and how long it would take for him to train etc etc, but in the end I wanted their reunion to be in parallel with canon, so I'm sorry the maths doesn't really add up. Hey, it's a fictional universe and I can put John in the military for as long as I darn well please. I should also probably credit the marvelous E. E. Cummings for both of his poems referenced within this, and also from nicking the title from him. 
> 
> This is my first 'proper length' fic, but it definitely won't be my last. I enjoyed myself so much more than I thought I would, and it wouldn't have been the same without all your support. So thanks, I guess.


End file.
